arXiv:2606. 14561v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotics manipulation research increasingly focuses on two-finger parallel grippers for their effectiveness, affordability, and ease of teleoperation.
By Francesco Capuano, Maximilian Eberlein, Fabrice Bourquin, Clemens Claudio Christoph
arXiv:2607. 11874v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work in humanoid whole-body control has found success with a simple recipe: retarget human motion to robot kinematic references, then train policies via reinforcement learning (RL) to track them.
By Yunhai Feng, Natalie Leung, Jiaxuan Wang, Lujie Yang, Haozhi Qi, Preston Culbertson
Recent work in humanoid whole-body control has found success with a simple recipe: retarget human motion to robot kinematic references, then train policies via reinforcement learning (RL) to track them. But how does this recipe transfer to dexterous manipulation?
arXiv:2608. 15917v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale pre-training has made robot policy fine-tuning increasingly data-efficient, but this progress has largely been driven by datasets and embodiments built around simple parallel-jaw grippers.
By Sarthak Kamat, Adam Rashid, Satvik Sharma, Aseem Doriwala, Chelsea Finn, Phillip Isola, C. Karen Liu
arXiv:2603. 12120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce CRAFT hand, a tendon-driven anthropomorphic hand with hybrid hard-soft compliance for contact-rich manipulation.
By Leo Lin, Shivansh Patel, Jay Moon, Svetlana Lazebnik, Unnat Jain
arXiv:2607. 00033v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dexterous robot manipulation can benefit from the abundance of human demonstrations, but transferring such demonstrations to robot policies remains challenging.
By Xinghao Zhu, Zixi Liu, Shalin Jain, Chenran Li, Milad Noori, Huihua Zhao, John Welsh, Michael Andres Lin, Wei Liu, Tingwu Wang, Xingye Da, Zhengyi Luo, Vishal Kulkarni, Naema Bhatti, Yuke Zhu, Linxi Fan, Bowen Wen, Danfei Xu, Soha Pouya, Yan Chang
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: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
The paper introduces PA‑RL, a reinforcement‑learning framework that uses artificial potential fields as the action representation for contact‑rich robotic manipulation. Instead of directly commanding motion, the policy adjusts potential‑field parameters, which a Cartesian impedance controller then executes, decoupling task strategy from low‑level control. In peg‑in‑hole experiments, PA‑RL achieved a 100% success rate in simulation, outperformed baselines in torque and acceleration variation, and transferred to a real robot without fine‑tuning.
By Xinyu Liu, G\"okhan Solak, Arash Ajoudani
arXiv:2602. 13197v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The ability to learn manipulation skills by watching videos of humans has the potential to unlock a new source of highly scalable data for robot learning.
By Albert J. Zhai, Kuo-Hao Zeng, Jiasen Lu, Ali Farhadi, Shenlong Wang, Wei-Chiu Ma
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
arXiv:2604. 09487v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tendon drives paired with soft muscle actuation enable faster and safer robots while potentially accelerating skill acquisition.
By Jan Schneider, Mridul Mahajan, Le Chen, Simon Guist, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Ingmar Posner, Dieter B\"uchler