arXiv Machine Learning

Generative Action-Chunk Sampling for Adaptive Stiffness Control in Physical Human-Robot Collaboration

The paper introduces an adaptive stiffness control framework for physical human‑robot collaboration that uses generative action‑chunk sampling conditioned on RGB images and joint‑torque estimates. By sampling multiple future action chunks, the system measures variation among them to adjust joint stiffness and damping in real time—higher variation leads to more compliance, while lower variation yields firmer assistance. In a collaborative transport experiment with four possible directions, the method achieved a 0.95 success rate, outperforming a fixed‑stiffness baseline (0.83) and a deterministic baseline (0.69).

arXiv AI
Jul 20

Interaction-Aware Whole-Body Control for Compliant Object Transport

arXiv:2603. 03751v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cooperative object transport in unstructured environments remains challenging for assistive humanoids because strong, time-varying interaction forces can make tracking-centric whole-body control unreliable, especially in close-contact support tasks.

By Hao Zhang, Yves Tseng, Ding Zhao, H. Eric Tseng
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

DexTouch-WM: Learning Action-Conditioned Tactile World Models from Human Touch for Dexterous Robot Manipulation

DexTouch-WM is an action‑conditioned world model that learns from scalable human touch to predict future RGB observations and bilateral tactile dynamics for dexterous robot manipulation. By using compatible piezoresistive arrays on both human and robot hands and retargeting human motion into the robot action space, the model can be supervised with human interaction data while keeping a fixed amount of real‑robot supervision. Experiments show that adding up to 100 hours of human interaction improves robot‑domain visual, geometric, and contact prediction, and the model can serve as a surrogate environment for policy evaluation and synthetic trajectory generation.

By Yan Qin, Yue Chen, Wenwei Lin, Shujia Liu, Chuqiao Lyu, Kailun Su, Chenze Yu, Ping Luo, Wenbo Ding, Tianxing Chen, Renjing Xu
arXiv AI
Jul 14

TACTIC: Tactile and Vision Conditioned Contact-Centric Control for Whole-Arm Manipulation

arXiv:2607. 09218v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Whole-arm manipulation involves direct contact with the environment while the robot completes a task by distributing contact across multiple links as contacts form, slide, and break.

By Rishabh Madan, Angchen Xie, Samantha Saak, Andres Blanco, Dohyeok Lee, Sarah Grace Brown, Yunting Yan, Mark Zolotas, Jose Barreiros, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
arXiv AI
Sep 4

FWBC-VLA: Force-Aware Whole-Body Compensation for Contact-Rich Loco-Manipulation

FWBC‑VLA is a force‑aware framework that links vision‑language‑action (VLA) models with whole‑body compensation control for wheeled‑legged robots. It introduces HSR‑Force, a sensorless residual‑torque estimator that infers contact strength and encodes this information as tokens for the VLA action decoder, allowing the policy to detect contact onset, loading, and release. The system fine‑tunes a pretrained VLA backbone on a large WL&Arm dataset, combines proprioceptive, Jacobian‑derived force, and contact estimates to generate corrective actions, and demonstrates effectiveness in real‑world tasks such as whiteboard wiping and door opening.

By Yutian Zhang, Siyuan Ma, Liwen Yang, Yang Li, Ce Hao, Haozhen Chi, Dong We, Qiaojun Yu, Dibo Hou
arXiv AI
Jul 13

Tactile and Vision Conditioned Contact-Centric Control for Whole-Arm Manipulation

arXiv:2607. 09218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whole-arm manipulation involves direct contact with the environment while the robot completes a task by distributing contact across multiple links as contacts form, slide, and break.

By Rishabh Madan, Angchen Xie, Samantha Saak, Andres Blanco, Dohyeok Lee, Sarah Grace Brown, Yunting Yan, Mark Zolotas, Jose Barreiros, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 8

SERNF: Sample-Efficient Real-World Dexterous Policy Fine-Tuning via Action-Chunked Critics and Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2602. 09580v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world fine-tuning of dexterous manipulation policies remains challenging due to limited real-world interaction budgets and highly multimodal action distributions.

By Chenyu Yang, Denis Tarasov, Davide Liconti, Romain Guntz, Hehui Zheng, Robert K. Katzschmann
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Energy-Regularized Imitation Learning for Force- and Work-Aware Robotic Manipulation

This paper introduces an energy-aware approach to robotic manipulation by defining a joint-space mechanical-work proxy based on joint torque and angular displacement. A differentiable energy predictor is trained to estimate this work from robot states and actions, enabling it to serve as a regularizer that fine‑tunes a pretrained manipulation policy. Applied to RVT‑2 on RLBench, the method reduces average mechanical work from 208.8 J to 204.4 J (a 2.1 % drop) while slightly improving task success from 86.2 % to 86.9 % across 12 manipulation tasks.

By Toshiki Otani, Hiromu Taketsugu, Norimichi Ukita