arXiv AI

TACTFUL: Tactile-Driven Exploration For Object Localization and Identification in Confined Environments

arXiv:2606. 24712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans effortlessly locate and identify objects by touch alone, even without vision.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

OmniTacTune: Policy-Agnostic Real-World RL for Tactile Residual Adaptation of Visual Policies

arXiv:2607. 03723v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual policies learned from human videos, teleoperation, and robot demonstrations offer scalable motion priors, but often fail in contact-rich manipulation, where success significantly depends on local force and contact geometry.

By Kelin Yu, Haode Zhang, Harish Ravichandar, Yunhai Han, Ruohan Gao
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

ControlTac: Scaling Tactile Data with Physically Controlled Tactile Image Generation

ControlTac is a two‑stage framework that generates realistic tactile images conditioned on a single reference image, contact force, and contact pose. By incorporating these physical priors, it produces realistic samples across different sensors and captures task‑relevant variations. Experiments in object insertion, imitation learning, and object weighting show that datasets augmented with ControlTac consistently improve performance in dynamic real‑world settings.

By Dongyu Luo, Kelin Yu, Amir-Hossein Shahidzadeh, Cornelia Ferm\"uller, Yiannis Aloimonos, Ruohan Gao
arXiv AI
3d ago

Tactile Curiosity Drives Robot Interaction

The paper introduces TacEx, a tactile‑curiosity framework that guides reinforcement learning agents to explore contact dynamics by focusing epistemic uncertainty on the tactile channel. By anchoring curiosity to touch, robots learn to manipulate and grasp objects without task rewards or demonstrations, generating an interaction‑dense dataset that supports offline pick‑and‑place policy learning. TacEx also enhances vision‑language‑action models through post‑training, improving downstream performance while remaining sample‑efficient.

By Klemens Iten, Alexander Proshkin, Bhavya Sukhija, Stelian Coros, Andreas Krause, Pieter Abbeel, Carmelo Sferrazza
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

TacCoRL: Integrating Tactile Feedback into VLA via Simulation

arXiv:2606. 11743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong visual, language, and action priors for robot manipulation, but visual observations alone often miss the local contact state required for contact-rich tasks.

By Siyu Ma, Yuqi Liang, Chang Yu, Yunuo Chen, Hao Su, Yixin Zhu, Yin Yang, Chenfanfu Jiang
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