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.
arXiv:2609.34182v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dexterous manipulation requires tactile feedback. However, robot tactile demonstrations are difficult to scale,because dexterous-hand teleope...
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.
arXiv:2602. 13197v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The ability to learn manipulation skills by watching videos of humans has the potential to unlock a new source of highly scalable data for robot learning.
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.
AffordSim is a scalable data generator and benchmark that integrates open‑vocabulary 3D affordance prediction into simulation‑based trajectory generation for robotic manipulation. Given a natural‑language task description, it synthesizes task‑relevant scenes, queries affordances, grounds them on object surfaces, samples region‑conditioned grasps, and selects executable candidates with motion planning, while randomizing pose, texture, lighting, noise, and backgrounds for sim‑to‑real transfer. The benchmark includes 50 tasks, five robot embodiments, and over 500 objects, achieving 93% of the success rate of manual contact annotations on affordance‑critical tasks and 89% on hard composite tasks, with policies trained on AffordSim transferring zero‑shot to a real Franka FR3 with 24% average success.
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.
arXiv:2609.24660v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human demonstrations offer a scalable way to collect manipulation data, but their contacts may be unstable or infeasible when transferred to a robot...
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.
arXiv:2610.14372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dexterous robot hands can receive useful motion intent from teleoperation or learned policies, but successful execution also depends on contact decis...
Tactus is a textile‑integrated glove that combines a thin, conformal 3D‑knit design with strategically placed capacitive tactile sensors and IMU‑fused pose tracking to capture natural human manipulation. It offers a calibrated, cross‑glove consistency pipeline and per‑session subject correction, achieving a minimum detectable force of 0.59 N and fingertip pose error of 11.0 mm even under heavy occlusion. The authors benchmark Tactus against two commercial gloves, presenting the first quantitative cross‑platform evaluation of tactile force regression and hand pose estimation.
arXiv:2608. 19759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multifingered grasping is a crucial robotic skill, but current deep-learning grasp planners often struggle to generalize to new objects because they are trained on limited, object-specific datasets.
The paper introduces DSP: Dexterity from Supervised Play, a framework where a robot learns a play policy from brief human demonstrations via behavior cloning and then autonomously gathers extensive interaction data to train a world model. During inference, the play policy guides model‑predictive control by proposing action sequences evaluated by the learned model, and a self‑play distillation step produces a closed‑loop, goal‑conditioned policy. Experiments on underactuated pushing and in‑hand pose reorientation show DSP outperforms hindsight behavior cloning by 69.6% in success rate and matches reinforcement learning performance while using 490 times less data.