Autonomous Droplet Navigation via Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2609.16369 · cs.LG, cs.RO, cs.SY, eess.SY, physics.flu-dyn · Submitted 2026-09-14 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG, cs.RO, cs.SY, eess.SY, physics.flu-dyn

Submitted: 2026-09-14

Updated: 2026-09-14

Comments: 43 pages, 15 figures, 3 tables including supplementary material. The source code is available via GitHub at https://github.com/rajneeshanand/DropletRunner. An archived version of all supplementary movies has also been uploaded to Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ewK2dxWxfzjd4kk6Df4cqKE3-3xCbOgf?usp=sharing

Code: https://github.com/rajneeshanand/DropletRunner

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Reinforcement Learning — 24× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• World Model — 17× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Hysteresis — 13× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Actor — 12× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Supplementary Information — 9× in this paper
• Zero-Shot Transfer — 9× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• PID Controller — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Steering — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Action Space — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adam — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Calibration — 3× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Core — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Deep Reinforcement Learning — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transfer Learning — 3× in this paper · explained in 10 episodes
• Ablation — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Closed-Loop Control — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• International Conference on Robotics and Automation — 2× in this paper
• Alignment — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Closed-Loop System — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Fidelity — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• High-Performance Computing — 1× in this paper
• Latent Dynamics — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Momentum transfer — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning (RL) — 1× in this paper · explained in 25 episodes

Sources

• Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand
• Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms

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