BrickSim: A Physics-Based Simulator for Manipulating Interlocking Brick Assemblies

Interlocking brick assemblies provide a standardized yet challenging testbed for contact-rich and long-horizon robotic manipulation, but existing rigid-body simulators do not faithfully capture snap-fit mechanics. We present BrickSim, the first real-time physics-based simulator for interlocking brick assemblies. BrickSim introduces a compact force-based mechanics model for snap-fit connections and solves the resulting internal force distribution using a structured convex quadratic program. Combined with a hybrid architecture that delegates rigid-body dynamics to the underlying physics engine while handling snap-fit mechanics separately, BrickSim enables real-time, high-fidelity simulation of assembly, disassembly, and structural collapse. On 150 real-world assemblies, BrickSim achieves 100% accuracy in static stability prediction with an average solve time of 5 ms. In dynamic drop tests, it also faithfully reproduces real-world structural collapse, precisely mirroring both the occurrence of breakage and the specific breakage locations. Built on Isaac Sim, BrickSim further supports seamless integration with a wide variety of robots and existing pipelines. We demonstrate robotic construction of brick assemblies using BrickSim, highlighting its potential as a foundation for research in dexterous, long-horizon robotic manipulation. BrickSim is open-source, and the code is available at https://github.com/intelligent-control-lab/BrickSim.

TeViR: Text-to-Video Reward with Diffusion Models for Efficient Reinforcement Learning

Developing scalable and generalizable reward engineering for reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for creating general-purpose agents, especially in the challenging domain of robotic manipulation. While recent advances in reward engineering with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown promise, their sparse reward nature significantly limits sample efficiency. This paper introduces TeViR, a novel method that leverages a pre-trained text-to-video diffusion model to generate dense rewards by comparing the predicted image sequence with current observations. Experimental results across 11 complex robotic tasks demonstrate that TeViR outperforms traditional methods leveraging sparse rewards and other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, achieving better sample efficiency and performance without ground truth environmental rewards. TeViR's ability to efficiently guide agents in complex environments highlights its potential to advance reinforcement learning applications in robotic manipulation.