A high-fidelity digital twin for robotic manipulation based on 3D Gaussian Splatting
Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, UK
  • Volume
  • Citation
    Sun Z, Bao L, Peng T, Sun J, Zhou C. A high-fidelity digital twin for robotic manipulation based on 3D Gaussian Splatting. Robot Learn. 2026(2):0013, https://doi.org/10.55092/rl20260013. 
  • DOI
    10.55092/rl20260013
  • Copyright
    Copyright2026 by the authors. Published by ELSP.
Abstract

Developing high-fidelity, interactive digital twins is crucial for enabling closed-loop motion planning and reliable real-world robot execution, which are essential to advancing sim-to-real transfer. However, existing approaches often suffer from slow reconstruction, limited visual fidelity, and difficulties in converting photorealistic models into planning-ready collision geometry. We present a practical framework that constructs high-quality digital twins within minutes from sparse red, green, blue (RGB) inputs. Our system employs 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for fast, photorealistic reconstruction as a unified scene representation. We enhance 3DGS with visibility-aware semantic fusion for accurate 3D labelling and introduce an efficient, filter-based geometry conversion method to produce collision-ready models seamlessly integrated with a Unity-ROS2-MoveIt physics engine. In experiments with a Franka Emika Panda robot performing pick-and-place tasks, we demonstrate that this enhanced geometric accuracy effectively supports robust manipulation in real-world trials. These results demonstrate that 3DGS-based digital twins, enriched with semantic and geometric consistency, offer a fast, reliable, and scalable path from perception to manipulation in unstructured environments.

Keywords

3D Gaussian Splatting; digital twin; robotic manipulation; Real-to-Sim-to-Real

Preview