arXiv Computer Vision

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.

arXiv AI
Jul 2

Learning Dexterous Manipulation Using Contact Wrench Guidance From Human Demonstration

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 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
Aug 19

ORPA: Online Residual Policy Adaptation for Robot Manipulation Control with Human Feedback

The paper introduces ORPA, a framework that adds a lightweight, feedback-conditioned module to a pretrained robotic manipulation policy, enabling real‑time residual adjustments in joint space without retraining the base policy. ORPA allows immediate correction of execution errors and distribution shifts, improving success rates and recovery on precision‑sensitive tasks compared to baseline policies and rule‑based inverse kinematics. The method is evaluated on the ALOHA platform, showing its effectiveness in real‑time deployment scenarios.

By Muhammad A. Muttaqien, Tomohiro Motoda, Ryo Hanai, Yukiyasu Domae