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
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. 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: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
Planning contact-rich whole-arm manipulation is challenging because interactions that involve extended robot geometry give rise to complex contact dynamics that are difficult to model accurately. This creates a need for planning principles that do not rely heavily on precise contact models.
arXiv:2609.16683v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Learning humanoid-object interaction requires coordinating whole-body balance, locomotion, and dexterous hand contact to control both robot and objec...
By Liu Cao, Xingze Wu, Jingzhi Cui, Botian Xu, Mingzhi Pei, Ruoqu Chen, Mengdi Xu
Real-world robotic assembly at sub-millimeter tolerances demands spatial precision, compliant interaction, and robustness to contact failures. We present Facet-0, a robotic foundation model that predi...
Learning humanoid-object interaction requires coordinating whole-body balance, locomotion, and dexterous hand contact to control both robot and object motion. Human demonstrations provide examples of...
arXiv:2606. 12406v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation requires force sensitivity, but many robot arms lack dedicated force sensors due to their high cost.
By Steven Oh, Jason Jingzhou Liu, Tony Tao, Philip Han, Kenneth Shaw, Satoshi Funabashi, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Deepak Pathak
arXiv:2608. 19776v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current dexterous grasp planners primarily optimize for physical stability, focusing on whether an object can be grasped rather than how it should be grasped to support downstream functional tasks.
By Julien Merand, Boris Meden, Liming Chen, Mathieu Grossard
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
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