Model-free reinforcement learning can acquire contact-rich robotic manipulation skills through trial-and-error interaction, but it often requires the policy to learn both task strategy and low-level m...
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: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:2606. 27475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots trained on real world data tend to be imprecise, slow, and brittle to perturbations.
By Raymond Yu, William Huey, Mustafa Mukadam, Anusha Nagabandi, Abhishek Gupta
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
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: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: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
arXiv:2603. 13707v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humanoid loco-manipulation requires coordinated task-space motion planning with stable loco-manipulation command tracking under complex robot-environment dynamics and long-horizon tasks.
By Zhaoyuan Gu, Yipu Chen, Zimeng Chai, Alfred Cueva, Thong Nguyen, Yifan Wu, Huishu Xue, Minji Kim, Isaac Legene, Fukang Liu, KyoungMok Kim, Ayan Barula, Yongxin Chen, Ye Zhao
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
This paper studies energy-aware manipulation as a physically grounded learning problem. We define a joint-space mechanical-work proxy from joint torque and angular displacement, and train a differenti...
arXiv:2506. 04147v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Building capable household and industrial robots requires mastering the control of versatile, high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) systems such as mobile manipulators.
By Jiaheng Hu, Peter Stone, Roberto Mart\'in-Mart\'in