SyncTwin: Fast Digital Twin Construction and Synchronization for Safe Robotic Manipulation

Abstract

Accurate and safe robotic manipulation under dynamic and visually occluded conditions remains a core challenge in real-world deployment. We introduce SyncTwin, a novel digital twin framework that unifies fast 3D scene reconstruction and real-to-sim synchronization for robust and safety-aware robotic manipulation in such environments. In the offline stage, we employ VGGT to rapidly reconstruct object-level 3D assets from RGB images, forming a reusable geometry library. During execution, SyncTwin continuously synchronizes the digital twin by tracking real-world object states via point cloud segmentation updates and aligning them through colored-ICP registration. The synchronized twin enables motion planners to compute collision-free and dynamically feasible trajectories in simulation, which are safely executed on the real robot through a closed real-to-sim-to-real loop. Experiments in dynamic and occluded scenes show that SyncTwin improves manipulation performance and motion safety, demonstrating the effectiveness of digital twin synchronization for real-world robotic execution. The video demos and code can be found on the project website: https://sync-twin.github.io/.