arXiv Machine Learning

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.

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
Jul 7

OmniTacTune: Policy-Agnostic Real-World RL for Tactile Residual Adaptation of Visual Policies

arXiv:2607. 03723v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual policies learned from human videos, teleoperation, and robot demonstrations offer scalable motion priors, but often fail in contact-rich manipulation, where success significantly depends on local force and contact geometry.

By Kelin Yu, Haode Zhang, Harish Ravichandar, Yunhai Han, Ruohan Gao
arXiv AI
Jul 14

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.

By Rishabh Madan, Angchen Xie, Samantha Saak, Andres Blanco, Dohyeok Lee, Sarah Grace Brown, Yunting Yan, Mark Zolotas, Jose Barreiros, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
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 AI
3d ago

Tactile Curiosity Drives Robot Interaction

The paper introduces TacEx, a tactile‑curiosity framework that guides reinforcement learning agents to explore contact dynamics by focusing epistemic uncertainty on the tactile channel. By anchoring curiosity to touch, robots learn to manipulate and grasp objects without task rewards or demonstrations, generating an interaction‑dense dataset that supports offline pick‑and‑place policy learning. TacEx also enhances vision‑language‑action models through post‑training, improving downstream performance while remaining sample‑efficient.

By Klemens Iten, Alexander Proshkin, Bhavya Sukhija, Stelian Coros, Andreas Krause, Pieter Abbeel, Carmelo Sferrazza
arXiv AI
Sep 18

TacSushi: Tactile-Grounded World-Action Modeling for Dexterous Sushi Manipulation

TacSushi is a tactile‑grounded, Cosmos3‑based world‑action policy for dexterous sushi manipulation. It encodes RGB, language, and hand state, fusing fingertip tactile data via feature‑wise gated fusion, and learns from future‑consequence predictions while excluding failed actions from imitation. Trained on 340 successful and 50 failed trials, TacSushi achieves 68.3% in‑distribution and 37.5% out‑of‑distribution success, outperforming baselines that lack future‑consequence supervision or use direct tactile concatenation.

By Haodi Hu, Kaen Kogashi, Toshiaki Koike-Akino