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:2606. 14981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time steering adapts pre-trained generative robot policies during deployment by verifying candidate actions before execution.
By Yilin Wu, Zilin Si, Zeynep Temel, Oliver Kroemer, Andrea Bajcsy
ControlTac is a two‑stage framework that generates realistic tactile images conditioned on a single reference image, contact force, and contact pose. By incorporating these physical priors, it produces realistic samples across different sensors and captures task‑relevant variations. Experiments in object insertion, imitation learning, and object weighting show that datasets augmented with ControlTac consistently improve performance in dynamic real‑world settings.
By Dongyu Luo, Kelin Yu, Amir-Hossein Shahidzadeh, Cornelia Ferm\"uller, Yiannis Aloimonos, Ruohan Gao
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:2606. 11767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Blind grasping with a dexterous hand is a crucial manipulation capability.
By Shengcheng Luo, Xiyan Huang, Zhe Xu, Wanlin Li, Ziyuan Jiao, Chenxi Xiao
arXiv:2609.14783v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Robots need touch to manipulate objects safely and reliably, as many properties, such as softness, texture, and contact stability, are hard to infer...
By Mashood M. Mohsan, Muhayy Ud Din, Binzhao Xu, Ahmad Abubakar, Irfan Hussain