arXiv AI

A Hierarchical Approach to Imitation Learning for Manipulation Tasks Requiring Time Varying Forces

arXiv:2608. 03103v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion policies have shown strong performance in learning complex, multi-modal behaviors for robotic manipulation.

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
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 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
arXiv AI
Aug 7

SkillMemo: Expert-guided Skill Memory Framework for Compositional Embodied Manipulation

arXiv:2608. 05970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied visuomotor models, including Diffusion Policy (DP) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, have demonstrated promising performance on robotic manipulation benchmarks.

By Changyuan Wang, Chubin Zhang, Zhenyu Wu, Runhao Li, Angyuan Ma, Ke Chao, Yinan Liang, Xiuwei Xu, Ziwei Wang, Yansong Tang, Jiwen Lu
arXiv AI
Aug 20

ADEPT: Accelerating Dexterity via Pre-Training and Post-Training using Reinforcement Learning

ADEPT is a reinforcement‑learning framework that first pre‑trains a dexterous policy on a generic object reposing task and then post‑trains downstream policies using this pretrained behavior as a prior. The approach avoids relearning basic skills for each new task, and employs a stable post‑training recipe—behavior‑cloning distillation, critic warm‑up, and conservative on‑policy updates—to preserve the pretrained capabilities. ADEPT’s joint‑space Geometric Fabric mediates between the policy and the robot, enabling zero‑shot sim‑to‑real transfer on a 23‑DoF Kuka‑Allegro and a 29‑DoF Flexiv‑Sharpa, where the robots solve long‑horizon tasks from challenging initial states at human‑level speed.

By Jayjun Lee, Jessica Yin, Asif Rana, Nicholas Blauch, Sam Mady, Mohak Bhardwaj, Nima Fazeli, Nathan Ratliff, Karl Van Wyk, Ankur Handa
arXiv AI
Sep 21

Potential-Field Action Representation for Reinforcement Learning in Contact-Rich Manipulation

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

Simple-to-Complex Structured Demonstrations for Vision-Language-Action Learning

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation by integrating visual perception, language understanding, and robot action generation. Existing research has primarily focused on improving model architectures, training strategies, and dataset scale, while little attention has been paid to how demonstrations are collected and organized.