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.
By Li Guan, Rachael Granberry, Sahar Aseeri, Sahar Rostami, Taylor Niehues, Sai Dhanooshi Marri, Mia Huang, Dingtian Zhang, Ziyi Kou, Jason Pursel, Eric Whitmire, Vatsal Mehta, Ashish Deshpande, Tristan Trutna, Reed Belcher, Emelia Black, Julian Blake, Roger Boldu, Sean Bonaventure, Einar Boyovich, Jordan Brennan, Elizabeth Casillas, David Christensen, Tyler Christensen, Nicholas Colonnese, Stuart Dealey, Gaige DeHaven, Katie Doran, Chris Doughty, Robert Drury, Silvia Espino, Gabriel Geyne, Beth Goodrich, Kyra Gould, Joe Grisso, Susana Guerrero, Andrew Gwozdziowski, Monica Ha, Ehsan Hajiesmaili, Kate Healy, Rose Hope, Michael Hurst, Claire Ikemiya, Daisy Isibor, Rick James, Yashasvi Joginapally, Samuel Johnson, Tyler Jorgensen, Kristy Jost, Ben Kamath, Slava Karulin, Alexander Keener, Woo Kim, Alison Krauskopf, Ankit Kumar, Joshua Lang, Lizzy Li, Cameron Lynch, Daniel Ma, Hector Martinon, Christina Matos, Keagan McCurdy, Lee Mincey, Stuart Nezlek, Tiffany Nguyen, James O'Hara, Jason Osborne, Jacky Pai, Roham Pardakhtim, David Perek, Alexandre Poulin, Nick Raines, Salwa Rasheed, Leah Resneck, Kevin Rhodes, Ergys Ristani, Douglas Roberts, Anik Sarker, Harrison Scarborough, Jonas Schmidtler, Brian Shieh, Benjamin Shuman, Garrett Simard, Forrest Smith, Udara Somarathna, Eliot Sosin, Jonathan Stewart, Kristine Strom, Adam Swett, Hal Talbot-Mantooth, Julia Tanner, Sai Sharan Thirunagari, Curtis Torrey, Simge Uzun, Eileen Wachs, Rylan Wasson, Henry Wei, Jesse White, Beau Woodbyrne, Antonio Woods, Noah Young, Chandler Yount, Joseph Zhang, Sean Keller
arXiv:2608.15060v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Touch is fundamental to dexterous manipulation, yet most egocentric human data increasingly used for robot learning lacks tactile information. Dire...
By Wenkang Zhang, Chengbo Yuan, Zicheng Zhang, Zhengxue Cheng, Yang Gao
TACROSS is a low‑cost, scalable system that enables robots to learn from human touch by aligning tactile streams at the level of contact events rather than raw sensor values. It combines a $10.86 piezoresistive glove with 285 sensing points and a temporal Transformer that maps heterogeneous signals into a shared 256‑dimensional latent space. The approach uses robot demonstrations for action supervision while human demonstrations aid tactile representation learning, achieving a 3.5‑fold efficiency improvement and a 95.7% reduction in demonstration equipment cost across four manipulation tasks.
By Bo Chen, Huanzhang Hu, Junyang Ma, Bo Yue, Fangdi Yu, Haijier Chen, Xianxin Lai, Shuyu Pan, Zhen Yang, Xiaoquan Sun, Wenze Cui, Zhongliang Jiang, Shaopeng Liu, Jiayu Chen
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.
By Shuoheng Zhang, Yifu Yuan, Hongyao Tang, Yan Zheng, Qiaojun Yu, Pengyi Li, Guowei Huang, Helong Huang, Xingyue Quan, Jianye Hao
arXiv:2606. 24712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans effortlessly locate and identify objects by touch alone, even without vision.
By Shivani Kamtikar, Chung Hee Kim, Camilla Tabasso, Tye Brady, Joshua Migdal, Taskin Padir
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.
By Yan Qin, Yue Chen, Wenwei Lin, Shujia Liu, Chuqiao Lyu, Kailun Su, Chenze Yu, Ping Luo, Wenbo Ding, Tianxing Chen, Renjing Xu
arXiv:2505. 05517v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Functional grasping is essential for enabling dexterous multi-finger robot hands to manipulate objects effectively.
By Hongyi Chen, Yunchao Yao, Yufei Ye, Zhixuan Xu, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Jiashun Wang, Arthur Jakobsson, Ruihan Zhao, Shubham Tulsiani, Zackory Erickson, Jeffrey Ichnowski
Tactile-JEPA is a self‑supervised pre‑training method for distributed tactile sensors that leverages the sensors’ spatial topology to learn topology‑aware representations. It predicts embeddings of masked sensing elements using a sensor connectivity graph and dual‑scale masking to capture both local contact details and the global tactile surface state. Evaluated on three diverse datasets, it improves force estimation by 6.3 % and in‑hand orientation error by 20.8 % over previous state‑of‑the‑art methods, and yields consistent gains in downstream tasks such as policy learning.
By Elizaveta Kovtun, Matvey Konovalov, Andrey Sakhovskiy, Semen Budennyy
HydroShear is a hydroelastic tactile simulator that models stick‑slip transitions, path‑dependent force and shear buildup, and full SE(3) object‑sensor interactions. It uses Signed Distance Functions to track indenter displacements on a sensor membrane, producing physics‑based force fields from arbitrary watertight geometries while remaining engine‑agnostic. Experiments on GelSight Minis show HydroShear reproduces real tactile shear more faithfully than existing methods, enabling zero‑shot sim‑to‑real reinforcement learning with a 93% success rate across four dexterous tasks.
By An Dang, Jayjun Lee, Mustafa Mukadam, X. Alice Wu, Bernadette Bucher, Manikantan Nambi, Nima Fazeli
ProxiDex is a dynamics‑guided proximity policy framework for multi‑finger dexterous manipulation that treats hand‑object proximity as an interaction state. It reconstructs interaction point clouds, converts geometric distances into proximity cues, and learns action‑conditioned proximity dynamics using a coupled forward‑inverse design. The framework adaptively reweights proximity tokens across manipulation phases and employs dynamics‑consistency supervision to stabilize action generation, leading to improved success rates and robustness in both simulation and real‑world experiments.
By Yushan Bai, Boyu Zheng, Zhiyang Mao, Hongzheng Sun, Yuchuang Tong, En Li, Zhengtao Zhang
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.
By Haonan Chen, Feiyang Wu, Yuxiang Ma, Mustafa Mete, Pengfei Ye, Junxuan Shen, Cheng Zhu, Aurora Ruggeri, Kelvin Cheung, Jiayuan Mao, Edward Adelson, Jiajun Wu, Robert D. Howe, Yilun Du
Multi-finger dexterous manipulation relies on stable hand-object interactions, yet these interactions are partially observable in practice. Visual observations are often occluded by the hand, tactile...