arXiv:2512. 10946v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Human-level contact-rich manipulation relies on the distinct roles of two key modalities: vision provides spatially rich but temporally slow global context, while force sensing captures rapid local contact dynamics.
By Wendi Chen, Han Xue, Yi Wang, Fangyuan Zhou, Jun Lv, Yang Jin, Shirun Tang, Chuan Wen, Cewu Lu
arXiv:2609.01596v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Real-world robotic assembly at sub-millimeter tolerances demands spatial precision, compliant interaction, and robustness to contact failures. We pre...
By Haoyuan Deng, Haichao Liu, Wenkai Guo, Yuan Ling, Zaijia Yang, Yuanjiang Xue, Haosheng Sun, Liangzi Wang, Ziwei Wang
The paper introduces an interaction‑centric framework that unifies representations for two‑finger gripper manipulation across different robot embodiments. By using a parameterized universal gripper abstraction and a canonical gripper‑frame representation, the system infers sub‑tasks from language and RGB‑D inputs, grounds interaction triplets, and employs hybrid features and a Flow‑Matching Transformer to generate smooth 7‑DoF action sequences. Experiments in both simulation and real‑world settings show that this approach achieves competitive benchmark performance while enabling extreme cross‑embodiment and cross‑viewpoint zero‑shot sim‑to‑real transfer to heterogeneous robot platforms.
By Guanlin Li, Shifeng Bao, Yihan Zhao, Haitao Shen, Haoyang Li, Chen Zhao, Tong Yang, Jie Tang, Jing Zhang
Real-world robotic assembly at sub-millimeter tolerances demands spatial precision, compliant interaction, and robustness to contact failures. We present Facet-0, a robotic foundation model that predi...
arXiv:2511. 14427v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Effective contact-rich manipulation requires robots to synergistically leverage vision, force, and proprioception.
By Rickmer Krohn, Vignesh Prasad, Gabriele Tiboni, Georgia Chalvatzaki
The paper presents a method for force‑aware manipulation that relies solely on visual predictions of force from a compliant Fin Ray gripper. It trains a visual force estimator on calibration data to annotate demonstrations, then uses these annotated demonstrations to train an action–force proposal policy that generates candidate actions and their expected forces. At deployment, the robot selects the action whose predicted force best matches a target force from the demonstrations, enabling contact‑rich tasks such as berry picking, can grasping, in‑hand reorientation, and plug insertion without physical force or tactile sensors.
By Haonan Chen, Feiyang Wu, Yuxiang Ma, Mustafa Mete, Pengfei Ye, Junxuan Shen, Cheng Zhu, Aurora Ruggeri, Kelvin Cheung, Jiayuan Mao, Edward Adelson, Jiajun Wu, Robert D. Howe, Yilun Du
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:2606. 10614v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic foundation models pre-trained on human demonstration videos have shown promise, but a significant embodiment gap remains when the resulting policies are deployed on real robots.
By Beomjun Kim, Seong Hyeon Park, Seunghoon Sim, Seungjun Moon, Sanghyeok Lee, Jinwoo Shin
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. 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
ULTRA is a unified framework for autonomous humanoid whole-body locomotion and manipulation that overcomes limitations of prior methods by combining a physics-driven neural retargeting algorithm with a multimodal controller. The retargeting algorithm translates large-scale motion capture data into physically plausible humanoid motions, while the controller learns to handle both dense motion references and sparse task specifications using a range of sensory inputs, from accurate motion-capture states to noisy egocentric vision. In simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid, ULTRA demonstrates improved generalization and robustness, enabling coordinated whole-body behavior from sparse intent without relying on test-time reference motions.
By Xialin He, Sirui Xu, Xinyao Li, Runpei Dong, Liuyu Bian, Yu-Xiong Wang, Liang-Yan Gui
PiHand is a physics‑based framework that learns latent hand‑object interaction priors for dexterous manipulation. It first trains expert policies to track motion capture demonstrations, then distills these into a goal‑conditioned VAE that captures coupled hand‑object motion. Using bounded residual exploration in this latent space, PiHand produces general tabletop manipulation policies that generalize to unseen objects and trajectories, outperforming baselines across multiple tasks.
By Niklas Berndt, Xianghui Xie, Enes Duran, Yixiao Wang, Gerard Pons-Moll