arXiv AI

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.

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 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 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 Machine Learning
Sep 18

Agile-WAM: An Agile Tactile World Action Model for Contact-Rich Robot Control

Agile-WAM is a tactile World Action Model that jointly predicts future visual and tactile states and robot actions for contact‑rich manipulation. It encodes visual and tactile observations into a shared latent space and uses a vision‑tactile‑to‑action flow‑matching process to generate action chunks and future latents. The model introduces multi‑horizon multimodal prediction, leveraging the different timescales of vision and touch, and achieves a 29.4 % improvement in real‑world success rates with 11.9 ms inference latency across nine simulated and five real‑world tasks.

By Hanchu Zhou, Brendan Lynch, Raman Goyal, Dechen Gao, Begum Kasap, Boqi Zhao, Junshan Zhang
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
arXiv AI
Sep 16

ProxiDex: Learning Dynamics-Guided Proximity Policy for Dexterous Manipulation

ProxiDex is a dynamics‑guided proximity policy framework for multi‑finger dexterous manipulation that treats hand‑object proximity as an interaction state. It reconstructs interaction point clouds, converts geometric distances into proximity cues, and learns action‑conditioned proximity dynamics using a coupled forward‑inverse design. The framework adaptively reweights proximity tokens across manipulation phases and employs dynamics‑consistency supervision to stabilize action generation, leading to improved success rates and robustness in both simulation and real‑world experiments.

By Yushan Bai, Boyu Zheng, Zhiyang Mao, Hongzheng Sun, Yuchuang Tong, En Li, Zhengtao Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 26

ForceFlow: Learning to Feel and Act via Contact-Driven Flow Matching

ForceFlow is a force-aware reactive framework that uses flow matching to improve contact-rich manipulation. It fuses force signals asymmetrically, treats force as a global regulator, and employs a joint prediction paradigm to couple force and motion. The approach splits tasks into a vision-dominant localization stage and a touch-dominant execution stage, using a Vision-to-Force handover to separate spatial generalization from contact regulation.

By Shuoheng Zhang, Yifu Yuan, Hongyao Tang, Yan Zheng, Qiaojun Yu, Pengyi Li, Guowei Huang, Helong Huang, Xingyue Quan, Jianye Hao