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Towards Reliable Sequential Object Picking in Clutter: The Runner-up Solution to RGMC 2025

T0 review · 0 major / 2 minor · reviewed 2026-06-27 · grok-4.3

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Pith's one-line read An integrated pipeline with a multifunctional gripper and novel occlusion representations enables reliable sequential object picking in cluttered environments.

desk verdict A competition report on a second-place practical pipeline for sequential picking in clutter, with gripper tweaks and occlusion representations but thin on data or comparisons. read the letter →

arxiv 2606.12954 v1 pith:X4CGS7EB submitted 2026-06-11 cs.RO

Wei Yu , Xidan Zhang , Ziyi Zheng , Weijie Kong , Huixu Dong This is my paper
classification cs.RO
keywords roboticgraspingclutteredpickingsequentialmanipulationmultifunctionalgripperocclusionrepresentationcompetitiondeclutteringstrategies
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The reading

This paper introduces a hardware-software system for the demanding task of sequentially searching and picking objects from clutter. It tackles robust grasping of mixed rigid and deformable items while efficiently locating targets. The solution relies on a custom gripper and fresh ways to model how objects are distributed and occlude each other. Laboratory and competition tests show the approach works well enough to finish second in the Pick-in-Clutter track of RGMC 2025. Readers interested in practical robotics would care because few existing methods handle the full sequence of search and sort in real clutter.

What carries the argument

Multifunctional gripper hardware paired with representations of object distribution and occlusion relationships that support collision-aware planning and decluttering strategies.

What would settle it

A test showing low grasping success or inefficient search on a new collection of objects with different shapes, materials, or occlusion patterns would indicate the claim does not hold generally.

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Extended reading notes

Core claim

The authors claim their pipeline, built around a multifunctional gripper and representations of object distribution and occlusion relationships, delivers collision-aware grasping and efficient search, resulting in second place in the RGMC 2025 Pick-in-Clutter track.

Load-bearing premise

That the gripper design and the object distribution and occlusion representations will support robust performance across varied objects and clutter beyond the competition benchmark.

Editorial extensions

If this is right

  • The system achieves high success rates across rigid and deformable objects.
  • It enables efficient target search through decluttering in cluttered space.
  • Performance is validated in both controlled lab settings and the actual competition.
  • The approach handles sequential picking where prior methods were limited.

Reading between the lines

Editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • Similar representations might improve grasping in other unstructured environments like warehouses.
  • Future work could test the pipeline on continuously changing clutter to check real-time adaptability.
  • The competition result suggests the design choices scale to contest-level benchmarks but may need tuning for broader use.
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Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit.

Referee Report

0 major / 2 minor

Summary. The manuscript presents an integrated hardware-software pipeline for sequential object picking in cluttered environments, featuring a multifunctional gripper design and novel representations for object distribution and occlusion relationships. It addresses challenges in robust collision-aware grasping and efficient search for rigid and deformable objects on the CEPB benchmark, claiming strong performance in lab tests and competition scenarios that resulted in second place in the Pick-in-Clutter track of RGMC 2025.

Significance. If the described pipeline performs as claimed, the work offers a practical, competition-validated system for industrial robotic manipulation tasks that remain difficult. The external falsifiable signal from the RGMC 2025 placement on a standardized benchmark is a clear strength, providing evidence of real-world applicability beyond internal simulations or controlled experiments.

minor comments (2)
  1. [Abstract] Abstract: the phrase 'novel representations for object distribution and occlusion relationships' is introduced without any definition, diagram, or pseudocode, leaving the core technical contribution opaque.
  2. [Abstract] Abstract: the assertion of 'strong performance in both laboratory tests and competition scenarios' is unsupported by any success rates, timing data, failure modes, or comparison to other entries.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

0 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for the positive summary, acknowledgment of the competition-validated performance on the standardized CEPB benchmark, and recommendation for minor revision. No specific major comments were provided in the report.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged · score 0.0 of 10

No significant circularity

full rationale

The paper is a competition report describing a hardware-software pipeline for robotic grasping. It contains no equations, derivations, fitted parameters, or predictions. The central claim rests on an external, falsifiable outcome (second place in RGMC 2025 Pick-in-Clutter track on the CEPB benchmark), which is independent of any internal construction. No self-citations, ansatzes, or self-definitional steps are present in the provided text. The derivation chain is therefore self-contained and non-circular.

Assumptions & free parameters 0 free parameters · 0 assumptions · 0 invented entities

Review conducted on abstract only; no full text available to extract or evaluate free parameters, axioms, or invented entities.

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Cite this review

Pith. "Pith review of Towards Reliable Sequential Object Picking in Clutter: The Runner-up Solution to RGMC 2025." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/X4CGS7EB

@misc{pith2026260612954,
  author       = {Pith},
  title        = {Pith review of: Towards Reliable Sequential Object Picking in Clutter: The Runner-up Solution to RGMC 2025},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/X4CGS7EB}},
  note         = {Machine review of arXiv:2606.12954}
}
read the original abstract

As a long-standing challenge in robotic manipulation, stable and efficient grasping in cluttered environments is of great importance in industrial settings. While recent studies have achieved relatively high success rates in grasping from clutter, there remain few mature solutions for more demanding tasks such as sequential object search and sorting. This work addresses sequential object picking in cluttered environments based on the Cluttered Environment Picking Benchmark (CEPB) and presents our solution to the Pick-in-Clutter track of the 10th Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition (RGMC) at ICRA 2025. The task poses several key challenges. First, it requires robust and collision-aware grasping with high success rates across a diverse set of objects, including both rigid and deformable ones. Second, it demands efficient search for target objects, which places stringent requirements on the decluttering and searching strategies of the solution. To address the above challenges, we design an integrated hardware-software pipeline that combines object recognition, decluttering, and multi-modal grasping. The main contributions include the hardware design of a multifunctional gripper and novel representations for object distribution and occlusion relationships in cluttered space. This pipeline enables efficient recognition, search, and sequential grasping of objects in clutter, demonstrating strong performance in both laboratory tests and competition scenarios, and ultimately achieving second place in the Pick-in-Clutter track of the RGMC 2025.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2606.12954 by the authors.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Overview of our pipeline for sequential object picking from cluttered bins, which encompasses the object detection and segmentation process (top-left), rearragement policy (bottom) and grasp policy (top-right). I. INTRODUCTION As a long-standing challenge in robotic manipulation, stable and efficient grasping in cluttered environments is of great importance in industrial settings. While recent studies[1-5] have achi… view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Towards Reliable Sequential Object Picking in Clutter: The Runner-up Solution to RGMC 2025 Wei Yu1,*, Xidan Zhang1,*, Ziyi Zheng1,*, Weijie Kong1 and Huixu Dong1,† [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p001_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Hardware setup consisting of the UR5e robotic arm, adaptive gripper, and wrist-mounted camera. B. Object Detection and Segmentation To achieve real-time detection and segmentation of indi￾vidual objects in clutter, we adopt NIDS-Net[7], a recently proposed framework for novel instance detection and seg￾mentation. NIDS-Net combines object proposal generation, embedding construction for both templates and candidate re… view at source ↗

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Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

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Reviewed June 27, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.