https://embodied-ai-radar.com/topics/manipulation.xml 2026-11-10T00:00:00ZEmbodied AI Radar https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12885 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Trained action policies write manipulation skill into network weights, tying what is learned to the distribution it is learned from. In-context learning (ICL) avoids this coupling but has not matched trained policies, because a demonstration recorded in another scene carries no feedback from the world the robot currently faces. We observe that what an agent learns in context is semantic, recording task steps and object roles rather than visual appearance, so experience gathered in one world transfers to another. Based on this insight, we propose World In-Context Learning (WICL), a paradigm in …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12806 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Tactile sensing is an indispensable modality for contact-rich dexterous manipulation, a capability that hints at the ultimate frontiers of embodied intelligence. However, commercially available tactile sensors are still at a relatively early stage of development, with each type of sensor offering irreplaceable strengths alongside its own drawbacks. A key challenge is thus to free tactile understanding from sensor-specific physics, so that embodied models can effectively leverage heterogeneous tactile data. To this end, we develop LingBot-Touch, a tactile foundation model characterized by the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12804 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

A challenging bottleneck in manipulation research is reproducibility and comparability of methods in real-world environments. Since manipulation is an interactive task, it cannot be evaluated on a static dataset of observations. Benchmarking in simulation is a common remedy, but cannot cover the whole complexity of real-world tests. This paper proposes a new paradigm of stochastic challenges. Like the well-known YCB objects, it is based on reproducible real-world scenes and therefore allows system-level innovation and comparability between different platforms. Due to their stochastic nature, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12409 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Robots are increasingly expected to execute natural-language manipulation tasks in real-world environments. This is particularly relevant in household assistance and logistics, where clutter requires reasoning about both task objectives and execution feasibility. This challenge becomes even more pronounced for bimanual humanoid platforms, where coordinating two manipulators introduces additional interaction and kinematic constraints. We present a zero-shot vision-language framework for execution-aware bimanual manipulation that jointly reasons about task objectives and physical feasibility. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12383 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Modern visuotactile sensors primarily sense contact by imaging the deformation of a compliant interface. Using techniques such as photometric stereo, they can recover detailed contact geometry, often represented as surface normals or depth. However, force-related information typically still needs to be inferred indirectly through calibration, geometric reconstruction, or learned mappings. Mechanochromic photonic-crystal (PC) materials offer an alternative physical encoding mechanism: contact loading changes their periodic microstructure and spectral response, directly transforming local …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12251 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Reinforcement learning (RL) from raw sensory inputs such as images or onboard sensors can be challenging due to high-dimensional observations and sparse rewards. A common strategy is to train a teacher policy with access to privileged state information and then distill it into a student policy that acts from raw inputs alone. However, when the teacher relies on information unavailable to the student, exact imitation may be impossible, creating an irreducible imitation gap. Existing approaches typically mitigate this mismatch through careful reward shaping or additional reinforcement learning …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12175 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Robotic manipulation has advanced rapidly in mapping visual observations and language instructions to actions. However, reliable manipulation in open-world environments requires robust spatial understanding: the ability to identify targets in complex layouts (spatial reasoning) and adapt to scenes that continuously evolve through interaction (spatial memory). Yet existing embodied benchmarks fall short in evaluating spatial understanding: they often introduce strong visual cues that bypass spatial reasoning, and focus on static scenes that offer little insight into an agent's capacity for …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12130 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Hand kinesthetic feedback is crucial for restoring and enhancing human perception of force and displacement in robotic hand teleoperation. Wide perception range of force feedback is vital in rendering objects of different stiffness, especially for high-stiffness rendering. However, existing approaches struggle to achieve wide range of force feedback while maintaining compact and wearable design. This paper presents a hand exoskeleton system employing magnetorheological (MR) brakes to provide a wide range kinesthetic feedback during teleoperation. The MR brake provides a braking torque ranging …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12111 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Dexterous hands enable versatile manipulation, but policies trained in simulation often degrade on hardware owing to non-idealities, and the high-dimensional action space makes real-world adaptation costly. Piano playing, which requires precise and coordinated multifinger motion, offers a representative testbed. We propose GAP (Generalized Adaptation Prior for Dexterous Piano Playing), a sample-efficient adaptation framework that learns how to adapt, rather than how to act, during simulation pretraining and transfers this adaptation prior to hardware. Between repeated executions, GAP uses …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12072 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

The motion of an articulated part in cluttered surroundings is constrained not only by an object's intrinsic joint limits but also by extrinsic obstacles. However, existing approaches primarily consider object articulation properties alone. Here we present Motion Constraint Prediction Network (MoCo-Net), a two-stream neural network that jointly predicts the continuous motion ranges of articulated parts and obstacle heatmaps highlighting potential collision regions from partial-view point cloud observation. By capturing both internal and external motion constraints, MoCo-Net produces more …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12017 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Dexterous grasping in robotics relies on distinct hand configurations depending on object geometry. We introduce BetaGrasp, a 3D diffusion policy that conditions a DP3-style point-cloud policy on a four-class grasp label (crimp, sloper, pinch, and jug), running on a Franka arm with a 16-DoF LEAP hand. We also introduce a climbing-hold benchmark: a spring testbed whose ratchet gives a slip-force reading in newtons. In our analysis the policy's point-cloud encoder did not separate the four holds, so the scan alone gave it little to choose a grasp from. Without the label (a DP3-style baseline), …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11981 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have begun incorporating thermal sensing, but existing approaches typically treat thermal images as ordinary visual inputs, providing limited support for temperature-aware relational reasoning in manipulation. To address this limitation, we propose Thermo-VLA with a ThermoRes Encoder, which decomposes thermal images into cold and hot attribute representations and injects them into the RGB token through language-conditioned residual modulation, enabling temperature-driven target selection and continuous manipulation. We further construct six …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11941 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Flipping is a fundamental robotic manipulation skill that requires reorienting a target object in a stable pose on a planar support surface by rotating it 180$^\circ$ about an axis parallel to the support surface -- think of flipping a coin from heads to tails. Although flipping is a common objective in industrial tasks such as parts inspection, mechanical assembly, and tool use, coding a bimanual robot with grippers to flip diverse objects is a significant challenge. In this paper, we show that a coding agent can autonomously develop and refine object-flipping strategies through iterative …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11854 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models pair a vision-language backbone with an action head, but in closed-loop control the backbone sits on the control-critical path: while it computes, the robot keeps moving, so each executed action is conditioned on an increasingly stale observation. A larger backbone therefore directly blocks reactivity, especially in humanoid dexterous manipulation. We present DASH, a Decoupled Asynchronous System for Humanoids that removes this coupling. DASH splits the policy into a slow vision-language model (System 2) and a fast flow-matching action head (System 1) that …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11798 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

While imitation learning has made substantial progress toward generalizable robot manipulation through scaling, viewpoint robustness remains a major bottleneck. Visuomotor policies rely heavily on visual inputs, yet images provide an inherently ambiguous signal under viewpoint change: similar scenes may appear markedly different across viewpoints, while distinct states may share certain visual overlaps. A policy must therefore infer not only the task-relevant state, but also how it is visually projected under a particular camera configuration. This entanglement of viewpoint-dependent …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11554 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Humanoid loco-manipulation requires continuous coordination of high-dimensional whole-body motion to realize task objectives. While vision-language-action models and world action models transfer semantic and visual-dynamics priors to robot control, these priors do not necessarily capture the structure of robot motion. We introduce Kinematic Action Models (KAMs), a paradigm that treats whole-body motion as a direct pretraining target and uses a pretrained motion generator as the primary action-generation backbone. KAMs ground learned temporal and cross-body coordination priors through task …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11242 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Estimating the motion of deformable bodies in soft robotics from proprioceptive sensing is challenging due to partial observability, as internal observations provide only indirect access to global motion, contact, and shape evolution. In such settings, instantaneous observations are insufficient, and accurate estimation requires temporally consistent latent representations. This paper studies deformable motion estimation under proprioceptive partial observability from a latent dynamics perspective. We argue that a key requirement for long-horizon estimation is latent temporal consistency, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11166 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Dexterous manipulation requires rich spatial foresight over both the surrounding scene and the robot hand. Existing world-action models often acquire such predictive knowledge through explicit future prediction. We introduce DexForesight, a framework that learns spatial foresight implicitly by injecting dynamics-aware world representations into the latent space of a dexterous policy. During training, DexForesight learns an action-conditioned spatial world model from offline scene depth, kinematic hand geometry, and demonstration trajectories. The world model predicts 3D hand-point motion and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11123 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Recent robot manipulation benchmarks have enabled systematic evaluation of general-purpose robot policies across diverse objects, scenes, instructions, and embodiments. However, most existing benchmarks still assume that the robot is the only active agent and that task semantics are determined primarily by the instruction and object state. This assumption overlooks a common source of real-world variation: humans actively sharing the workspace. In such settings, humans may reveal an implicit goal, complete part of the task, temporarily change object availability, or constrain safe robot motion …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11087 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

We present SoftPAT3D, a physics-augmented framework for text-to-3D scene generation in which deformable objects, such as cloth, stuffed toys and ropes, are generated as physically valid, simulation-ready bodies and placed in intersection-free contact with the furniture that supports them, with one another and with themselves. Existing physics-augmented pipelines simulate rigid bodies only and cannot accommodate a generated deformable object, which text-to-3D generation returns as a geometrically invalid mesh, sometimes self-intersecting, that has no rest shape, no material model and no …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10994 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Humanoid robots must coordinate locomotion and manipulation to navigate complex environments and perform everyday tasks. Learning such behaviours from human demonstrations requires accurate whole-body motion paired with egocentric vision, particularly for lower-body movements and foot placements that are frequently invisible from a first-person perspective. However, existing egocentric datasets often lack high-fidelity optical motion capture or systematic coverage of diverse loco-manipulation behaviours. To address this gap, we introduce RoboMoCap, a large-scale multimodal dataset combining …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10967 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Dexterous manipulation with world action models (WAMs) relies on hand configuration and contact information, yet joint-state and whole-hand tactile observations may be partially or entirely missing. RGB images provide scene context and hand-object geometry but are insufficient to reliably recover these missing modalities. We further observe a correlation between hand state and tactile information. Motivated by this observation, we introduce BAT-WAM, a framework that bridges visual, joint-state, and tactile representations for WAMs. BAT-WAM learns separate codebooks and decoders for the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10825 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Selective data acquisition in Dataset Aggregation (DAgger) on robots requires deciding which learner rollouts to correct and when to intervene. In manipulation with ordered phases, router entropy from a phase-supervised soft mixture-of-experts (MoE) is insufficient: the same value can reflect either a normal adjacent-phase handoff or support for nonadjacent or earlier phases. We propose MoE-DAgger, which uses causal router history to distinguish these cases without providing the policy with a phase label, progress variable, or hard phase command during execution. The acquisition rule allows …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10647 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Policies for dexterous manipulation depend on design choices made before training: which sensors enter the observation, where they are placed, and how their readings are arranged for the encoder. These choices are rarely examined. For tactile sensing, simulation studies place taxels uniformly over the hand, and this placement has become a default without being tested. We test this default under a single controlled protocol. The protocol holds the teacher, the training procedure, and the candidate taxels fixed and varies only the sensor configuration and the representation. We evaluate it on …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10635 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Reliable navigation with a single monocular limited field-of-view camera is challenging because the lack of depth measurements and limited spatial awareness complicate collision checking. Existing approaches to tackle these challenges fall into two categories. Model-based planners can incorporate explicit collision-avoidance guidance which leads to better generalization but are often computationally expensive and require manual tuning of the algorithmic parameters. In contrast, end-to-end approaches trained by imitation learning can be flexible but typically encode safety only implicitly and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10510 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Self-improvement on compositional manipulation tasks requires deciding what to reuse, where to improve, and which changes to retain. We present ReSkill, a selective self-improvement framework that concentrates revision on capability gaps. A coding agent constructs an object-centric task graph from an instruction and a skill library, then uses node-level execution records to locate failures. At the task level, it revises stage organization, hand-off conditions, and recovery routes; at the skill level, it strengthens perception, motion, manipulation, and verification capabilities that …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10490 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Learned manipulation policies often rely on wrist-mounted cameras for close-range visual feedback that complements external views of the workspace. However, contact-rich manipulation requires establishing and maintaining contacts that can remain hidden even from wrist cameras. Tactile sensors mounted on fingers can reliably and directly measure contact, without needing visual access. In this work, we show that this feedback enables policies to recover the performance advantage of wrist cameras using scene and egocentric vision together with touch. Our approach incorporates two low-cost …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10451 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Most robotic handwriting rigidly mounts the pen and reduces writing to trajectory tracking. A freely held pen instead couples grasp stability, tip motion, and contact force. We present Grip, Trace, Write, a force-aware simulation environment and learning framework for high-DoF handwriting. A two-branch actor separates pen retention from arm-wrist writing while preserving their closed-loop coupling. Training learns a grasp controller, initializes writing from inverse-kinematics demonstrations by behavior cloning, and improves writing through reinforcement learning with rewards on ink, force, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10410 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Bimanual dexterous manipulation requires coordinated arm and hand control, yet specifying such coordination manually is challenging and often task-specific. In this work, we explore whether complex bimanual dexterity can emerge from a simple object-centric learning objective. We train reinforcement learning policies under a shared object-centric reward, varying their training environments rather than tuning separate rewards for each behavior. We find that the policies discover pre-grasp manipulation, grasping and regrasping, in-hand adjustment and handover to reach object-pose goals without …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10400 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Visuomotor policies can handle many robot manipulation tasks, but understanding their failures remains difficult. Unfamiliar conditions and small action errors can lead to failure, yet watching the robot alone tells us little about what went wrong inside the policy. We introduce MIND (Mechanistic Interpretability for Neural Diagnosis), a method that looks inside a trained policy to detect failures during execution and identify the internal concepts involved. MIND uses a sparse autoencoder to break down the policy's internal activations into features that can be studied individually. We give …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10343 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Generative robot policies based on diffusion and flow matching can model complex, multimodal behaviors, but remain susceptible to covariate shift during closed-loop execution. Existing approaches mitigate such failures through additional demonstrations, policy fine-tuning, or test-time guidance, but often require human intervention, engineered rewards, or other task-specific signals. We introduce GUARD, an anomaly-informed Q-steering framework that leverages the policy's training distribution to construct a dense, failure-anticipatory steering signal. GUARD pairs sparse task rewards with …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09892 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Recent work on robot manipulation has focused on specialist policies trained on demonstrations. We show that generalist AI models can control manipulators more reliably than specialist policies such as vision-language-action models (VLAs) and world-action models (WAMs). We systematically analyze agentic manipulation policies (AMPs), in which a generalist AI model commands the manipulator directly, adapting its actions as the task unfolds. We present AMP1, a reference harness that runs unchanged across single-arm, bimanual, and mobile manipulation. AMP1 achieves state-of-the-art results on the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09864 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Loco-manipulation, which requires mobile manipulators to coordinate locomotion and manipulation over long horizons, is a key capability for large-object rearrangement in applications such as service robotics and warehouse automation. Despite recent progress, reliably executing these tasks remains challenging because performance depends on complex robot-object and object-environment interaction dynamics. Existing approaches address this challenge either through model-based methods, which often require accurate dynamics models, or through learning-based methods, which reduce this requirement …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09794 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

When should a robot look at the cup, and when at the portafilter? Spatial-reasoning benchmarks evaluate whether a model can describe a scene, but manipulation needs something more specific: the ability to acquire the particular evidence that makes the current command executable. A view that is informative for one task can be useless for another, even at the same workstation. We introduce Seeing What Matters, a benchmark for task-conditioned actionable spatial belief in simulated tabletop manipulation. Across three domains--coffee workstation, drawer/cabinet, and microwave/appliance--the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09777 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Snake robots can leverage their hyper-redundant morphology for both locomotion and manipulation through distributed body contact but whole-body loco-manipulation is particularly challenging since the entire body serves simultaneously as propulsive mechanism and manipulation tool Prior work on wheeled legged and snake robot platforms has decoupled these functions through dedicated appendages body segmentation or grippers We present closed-loop loco-manipulation with our snake robot COBRA without this distinction such that any part of the body may make contact We develop a contact-implicit …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09266 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Scaling up visual humanoid loco-manipulation skill acquisition requires reducing the human effort needed as tasks and spatial configurations expand, particularly in demonstration collection and task-specific training design. We present SUGARv2, a unified framework for learning diverse visual humanoid loco-manipulation skills through interaction reference synthesis and a shared training pipeline. To obtain diverse references at low cost, we adapt reusable task templates to different spatial configurations, synthesizing coordinated robot and object motions. To reduce task-specific reward design …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09130 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Grasp-feasibility predictors report near-perfect accuracy on Task and Motion Planning benchmarks, but high accuracy on these benchmarks does not verify that a predictor uses the collision geometry that the motion planner checks. We propose a planner-verified counterfactual (CF) test: holding the grasp pose fixed, we insert a solid obstacle into the approach corridor, add its points to the model input, and let a planner re-derive the label, which flips from feasible to infeasible. Across eight predictors spanning point clouds, voxels, depth, and object tokens, CF-pair AUROC falls from high …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08939 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

We present RevoSim, a scalable and high-fidelity multimodal tactile simulator for the BrainCo Revo3 hand that jointly models 285 piezoresistive taxels and five visuotactile fingertips. RevoSim efficiently generates synchronized pressure, depth, RGB, and marker-displacement observations; on a single RTX 5090, its depth-conditioned marker-displacement configuration supports up to 4,096 parallel environments. We train in-hand manipulation and grasping policies entirely in simulation, establishing a foundation for future sim-to-real transfer. Project page: …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08664 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Humanoid robots are expected to take over strenuous material handling in manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare, where operating existing wheeled carts would let them move heavy loads without modifying the workplace. However, humanoid cart pushing remains challenging because the bimanual grasp closes a force-coupled loop in which the contact wrenches that drive the cart also disturb the robot's balance, and payload changes alter the coupled dynamics. We propose ForPC, a force-aware whole-body control framework that regulates cart velocity through two-stage reinforcement learning. A …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08577 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

We present Meituan-Robotics-0 (MR0), a vision-language-action foundation model and embodied-agent system for stationary-base desktop manipulation. MR0 combines 147 million vision-language samples with 15,060 hours of curated robot trajectories spanning 12 embodiments. A three-stage training recipe aligns multimodal representations with robot behavior through discrete action-token pre-training, transfers these priors to continuous cross-embodiment control through flow-matching mid-training, and adapts the policy through real-world post-training. We introduce Rollback, which pairs replaced …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08458 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Learning dexterous manipulation from limited visual demonstrations is challenging because policies must acquire both perceptual grounding and precise control, while reinforcement learning (RL) in simulation can acquire rich control behaviors from large-scale interaction with privileged information. We introduce \textbf{Latent RL Prior}, a two-stage framework that reuses this control knowledge for data-efficient visual policy learning. During privileged pretraining, we distill large-scale RL rollouts into a flow-matching action decoder conditioned on proprioception and latent task context. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08372 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Visuomotor policies trained through imitation learning are highly sensitive to changes in camera viewpoint. This is particularly problematic for mobile manipulation (MoMa), where robots rarely execute manipulation from the exact same base pose used during demonstration collection due to navigation uncertainty, localization drift, and environmental constraints. Recent approaches use novel-view synthesis (NVS) to augment demonstrations with unseen viewpoints, but they assume static scenes and therefore fail to re-render the manipulated object during the post-contact interaction phase, leaving …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07964 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Robots that manipulate moving objects act on observations that are outdated when the chosen skill starts, and the best skill can change within a few hundred milliseconds. Skill competence models, however, predict success for a launch at the moment of observation. We propose time-indexed skill success models, which predict whole-task success when a skill is launched after a given delay. Trained on rollouts branched at a grid of launch delays, they let a receding-horizon planner select both the skill and its launch time under fixed or random latency. In a MuJoCo study in which a UR5e captures a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07881 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Robotic simulators that represent shear within tactile sensing are becoming increasingly important for contact-rich manipulation. However, simulating contact shear with high-fidelity deformable or soft-body simulation is computationally demanding, limiting scalability to large-scale reinforcement learning. Here we introduce \textit{TactileLab}, a scalable multimodal tactile simulation framework built on IsaacLab, with a particular focus on a new optical-flow-based tactile representation termed \textit{simulated tactile flow}. Instead of relying on soft-body physics to model shear deformation, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07779 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Tactile sensing provides information about object properties that can improve robotic grasping and manipulation. However, accurate object recognition during the early stages of grasping remains challenging, particularly under strict real-time constraints. This study presents a flexible, distributed piezoelectric tactile sensing system for early-stage object recognition. The system was experimentally evaluated using six everyday objects and three recognition approaches: feature-based classification using support vector machines (SVMs), raw-signal classification using 1D convolutional neural …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07726 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Object rearrangement in cluttered tabletop scenes is challenging, especially in wide workspaces where dual-arm systems improve coverage and efficiency. Limited free space often necessitates buffering, while objects near or across the shared reachability region of the manipulators must be transferred under careful coordination to avoid inter-arm collisions. Conventional inter-arm transfer typically relies on a fixed handoff configuration, which constrains where and how objects are exchanged, enforces spatiotemporal synchronization of the arms, and reduces flexibility in dense layouts. This …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07651 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Modern 6-DoF grasp generators are often evaluated using grasp scores, dataset-level metrics, or single-robot demonstrations, yet proposal quality alone does not determine whether a grasp is executable by a particular robot. We present GraspBench, a controlled MuJoCo protocol for evaluating complete grasp-generation pipelines after robot-specific inverse-kinematics filtering, motion planning, and fixed approach-close-lift execution. GraspBench evaluates six configured pipelines across four robot embodiments, five diagnostic objects, and a structured tabletop pose grid, yielding 540 scenarios …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07532 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Contact-rich manipulation requires precise control under complex contact dynamics while remaining robust to diverse visual conditions. However, real-world reinforcement learning often overfits to the visual appearance of training scenes. We propose Semantics-to-Contact (S2C), a stagewise framework for visually robust contact-rich manipulation. The insight is to decompose the problem into two stages: semantic focusing and contact refinement. In the first stage, a vision-language model localizes task-relevant regions across visually diverse scenes, providing coarse spatial guidance and reducing …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07515 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Legged robots equipped with manipulators have shown significant potential in the fields of daily life and industry in complex environments. However, existing methods mainly focus on global navigation or manipulation independently, while overlooking the last-mile navigation problem, where the robot must jointly determine the base placement, approach direction, and grasp execution to achieve reliable object grasping, and different manipulation stages require distinct control behaviors. To address these challenges, we propose Last-Mile Grasp-Navigation (LMGN), a unified policy learning model for …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07513 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Most vision-language-action (VLA) policies decouple manipulation from cognition by bolting an external action mechanism onto a vision-language model (VLM)--either quantizing actions into discrete tokens whose errors bear no stable correspondence to physical displacements, or delegating continuous trajectory generation to a separate action expert whose gradients compete with or are blocked from updating the VLM backbone. We argue that manipulation and cognition should instead be embodied in the same model, shifting from a decoupled VLA to an Embodied Vision-Language Model (eVLM). We introduce …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07441 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Running evaluations of contact-rich robotic manipulation at statistical scale has largely been possible only at well-resourced labs, highlighting the need for affordable and efficient options for broader audiences. We present a reproducible evaluation harness wrapper based on a previous study at 200-rollout scale on serverless commodity GPUs, at a cost of approximately $3.50 USD and 38 minutes of wall-clock per replication (4.4 L4-GPU-hours across eight parallel shards). Using the harness, we report a partially controlled negative result on action chunking with sparse data: three …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07417 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Real-world environments are messy, with paths often blocked by everyday objects like chairs and toys, requiring robots to perform interactive navigation by manipulating obstacles to clear a path. Existing methods rely on extensive simulation-based learning or per-scene instructions specifying which objects to avoid or manipulate. They struggle to generalize across novel objects, diverse environments, and varied contexts such as a cart of fragile glassware that should be avoided while an empty one can be pushed. We formalize this problem as open-world interactive navigation and present …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07275 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Pre-trained diffusion and flow policies have emerged as powerful backbones for robotics, yet adapting them to novel data via reinforcement learning (RL) remains computationally expensive, sample inefficient and lacks theoretical guarantees. Prior approaches that fine-tune the initial noise bypass costly backpropagation through time but struggle with the "noise aliasing" problem: there does not exista natural link between the noise space value and the action space value. This paper resolves these challenges by introducing the Latent Noise Linear Markov Decision Process (LNL-MDP). We derive the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07272 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

VREgo trains manipulation policies from demonstrations recorded on consumer VR headsets; we instantiate it with EgoKit on one such headset, the PICO 4 Ultra. On-device head and hand tracking and stereo object localisation allow the operator to begin a demonstration at the table. We adapt HumanEgo's preprocessing to estimate grasp thresholds per recording, update object positions after release, and propagate segmentation masks between keyframes. We evaluate policies in simulation on two tabletop tasks recorded by one operator. For cube placement, we compare PICO and Project Aria recordings of …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07268 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

This paper presents a layered control framework that recasts high-dimensional system dynamics as a composition of dynamically interconnected subsystems, with dynamic dual-arm manipulation on the humanoid serving as a representative application. The humanoid is decomposed into a single rigid body (SRB) representing the torso and floating-base dynamic models representing the articulated arms and lower-body. The rigid connections between arm and torso and the closed kinematic chain formed between the end-effectors during cooperative manipulation are represented as holonomic constraints. The …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07261 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Deformable linear object (DLO) manipulation is challenging because high-dimensional configurations, nonlinear contact dynamics, and diverse material and geometric properties produce a broad range of object responses that are both difficult to model and data-intensive to learn. This work studies reinforcement learning for planar manipulation of a one-end-grasped DLO, focusing on training efficiency, observation design, robustness, and zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. We compare three Proximal Policy Optimization training stacks and find that the GPU-parallel MuJoCo Playground stack enables …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07235 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Robotic automation of laboratory tasks has become a growing interest to remove researchers from hazardous environments and repetitive procedures. However, even equipment as simple as squeeze bottles poses a challenging manipulation problem due to its deformability. This paper presents an adaptive hybrid vision-force controller for robotic grippers to effectively manipulate laboratory squeeze bottles to dispense liquid. This approach integrates force and vision feedback according to the interaction state, enabling effective squeezing while accounting for bottle deformation and recovery. The …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07229 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

The Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) enables scalable demonstration collection independently of a specific robot. However, its moving, close-range gripper cameras entangle camera and object motion without a stable external view, leaving the metric geometry needed for precise manipulation implicit in RGB. We introduce Spatial-UMI-Dream, a 5B spatial World Action Model (WAM) pretrained on 605 hours of RGB-D UMI data through two-stage training -- world-only adaptation followed by joint world-action learning -- to jointly predict future RGB, fisheye-aligned metric depth, and actions. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06724 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Dexterous robotic hands are increasingly coupled to large-scale human data and foundation models, yet progress in hardware, representation learning and evaluation is often assessed separately. This survey reviews work from January 2024 to early November 2026, with earlier studies included to establish technical lineages. We organize the literature into five interdependent layers: hardware; data collection and curation; cross-embodiment transfer; learning and foundation models; and evaluation and applications. Human hand-object understanding and tactile sensing provide two cross-cutting …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06689 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Teleoperating a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) in complex underwater environments presents unique challenges. Dynamic, three dimensional obstacles and unseen water currents pose real risks to expensive robotic hardware in environments in which recovery can be next to impossible. This paper explores the cognitive effects of haptic feedback to improve vehicle safety in such environments. An in-water study is analysed with a ROV exposed to controlled cross-currents, with environmental information presented via a soft and vibrating haptic touchpad. Results demonstrate that while encountering an …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06673 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Vision-based tactile sensors capture multiple aspects of physical interaction within a single image stream, including contact appearance, geometry, indentation depth, and tangential deformation. However, existing visuo-tactile policies often directly process tactile observations as images, making it difficult to determine which physical cues contribute to policy learning. This paper presents a controlled real-robot study that compares physically interpretable tactile signals using the LeRobot platform, enhanced with our visuo-tactile perception system. From the same tactile stream, we derive …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06475 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

In the real world, mobile manipulation robots must perform complex object interactions and make multi-step decisions, often relying on task-relevant information that is no longer observable. However, existing benchmarks provide limited evaluation of such memory-dependent decision-making in mobile manipulation. To address this gap, we introduce RoboCasa-Mem, a new benchmark comprising nine mobile manipulation tasks that require agents to use interaction history at key decision points. Specifically, the tasks are grouped into two categories of memory: One is environment memory, which captures …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06447 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) enable robots to perform manipulation tasks by leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to process visual observations and language instructions. However, the action prediction objective itself lacks fine-grained task-specific perceptual supervision, making it prone to relying on task-irrelevant visual shortcuts, leading attention away from target objects and key interaction areas, thereby limiting its operational performance and generalization ability. To address this, we propose Automatic Perception-Guided Attention Alignment for Robot Manipulation …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06359 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Vortex grippers are commonly integrated into automated systems for handling objects with complex geometries in packaging, sorting, and assembling. However, their interaction with compliant objects remains difficult to predict, particularly with respect to the vortex-induced torque transmitted during grasping. This study investigates vortex-induced torque during the grasping of compliant objects and quantifies the coupled effects of supply pressure, tangential nozzle diameter, surface geometry, and curvature. The results show that increasing the tangential nozzle diameter primarily enhances …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06118 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Manipulating visually identical objects with different physical properties requires adapting actions based on information acquired through interaction. We address the problem of learning from demonstrations how to adapt manipulation actions, such as regrasping and changing contact locations, based on physical-property information acquired during interaction. To this end, we propose a learning-from-demonstration method that learns latent representations of physical properties needed to predict object responses and conditions a policy on online estimates of these representations. A dynamics …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05979 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Manipulating diverse objects with multi-fingered dexterous hands is challenging due to the high dimensionality and complex dynamics. Human-Object Interaction (HOI) datasets provide rich knowledge about task information and embodied interactions. Instead of solely imitating the human demonstrations, our method learns to holistically predict future hand-object states by leveraging these datasets. The predicted future states of the object can serve as a general-purpose reward term for reinforcement learning, reducing reliance on task-specific reward engineering and enhancing generalization …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05754 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

We study physics-based retargeting of human demonstrations for robot learning: finding robot controls that reproduce reference motions under contact dynamics. We propose GRASP (Gradient Recovery from Archived Samples for Proposals), which combines sampling-based exploration with gradient-guided refinement without requiring a differentiable simulator. GRASP-TO extends tempered sequential Monte Carlo by fitting local quadratic cost models to archived rollouts and using their gradients to guide Markov chain Monte Carlo rejuvenation. Metropolis-Hastings correction preserves the target …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05507 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Humanoid motion tracking has scaled to general policies that reproduce diverse human motion, but the resulting behavior is in free-space: the tracker knows where the body should be, not how it should interact with the environment. Other work makes the object part of the objective, yet abstracts that interaction to contact or geometry, which leaves the demanding cases under-explored. We argue that force is a natural command channel between motion imitation and object interaction, one that specifies not just where to make contact but how hard. We present Ctrl-F, a hierarchical motion-force …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05368 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Imitation learning policies in robotics are trained on datasets collected through costly real-world teleoperation. Often, the data-collection process is unguided, relying on the teleoperator's intuition, resulting in data that contributes little to overall policy performance. Recent work has shown that curating such unguided datasets can substantially improve policy performance, but these approaches operate by filtering existing datasets after collection and therefore do not prevent the acquisition of uninformative data. In this work, we propose GUILD, a novel Guided Data Collection (GDC) …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05163 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Robot foundation models have shown remarkable performance in robot control, yet adapting them to a new task still relies heavily on teleoperated demonstrations. Egocentric human videos offer a scalable substitute, but overlaying rendered robots on human videos or retargeting human poses into robot actions leaves significant visual or action gaps for high-DoF robot embodiments. To address this limitation, we propose RoboTryOn, which treats human-to-robot translation as virtual try-on: try-on keeps the person and swaps the garment, RoboTryOn keeps the demonstrated motion and swaps the human for …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05119 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Dexterous manipulation involves not only moving objects, but also arranging the hand around them to maintain useful contacts and enable subsequent actions. Yet many learning-based systems specify goals primarily through object poses or trajectories, leaving hand-object configurations to emerge implicitly. We introduce DexHOT, which formulates dexterous manipulation as hand-object configuration transfer: moving between feasible configurations that jointly specify hand articulation and object pose relative to the wrist. DexHOT learns a reusable relation-conditioned transfer primitive from …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05113 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Hierarchical pipelines for humanoid loco-manipulation typically pair a task-agnostic whole-body controller (WBC) with a downstream task policy. Such WBCs are often trained through manual reward shaping, which yields visibly machine-like motions; more consequentially, they are trained without the manipulated object in the scene. Object dynamics are instead approximated through randomized end-effector force disturbances, a proxy that fails to reproduce the distributed multi-contact wrench a real payload applies across the arms and torso, with the gap becoming critical near the platform's …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05080 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Reinforcement learning (RL) is promising for adapting robot policies to unstructured real-world environments. However, standard RL pipelines rely on episodic training with frequent scene resets, which is impractical for real-world deployment due to the need for substantial human intervention. While prior work has studied non-episodic RL in relatively small policies trained from scratch, its behavior when fine-tuning modern large-scale pre-trained vision-language-action (VLA) models remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce CRONOS, a simulation benchmark for RL fine-tuning of VLAs …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04839 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Humanoid loco-manipulation requires coordinated body motion and hand interaction over time, and a plausible-looking command sequence can still drop a held object or leave an interaction incomplete. We present action-conditioned latent foresight, a latent world-action model (WAM) that evaluates proposed command sequences before execution. An action generator proposes joint motion-hand command sequences from vision, language, and the robot state. An action-conditioned endpoint predictor estimates the visual features each sequence prefix reaches and measures progress toward a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04522 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved promising performance for generalized robotic manipulation, yet their reliance on expensive real-robot data remains a fundamental bottleneck. A scalable alternative is to transfer knowledge from off-the-shelf human-centric videos. However, existing methods extract latent action representations that are entangled with scene-specific noise, diluting the transferred knowledge. Motivated by this limitation, we propose Action-Intent Transfer (AIT), a two-stage method that transfers knowledge through a clean action representation shared across …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04493 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Learning robust manipulation policies for diverse everyday objects remains challenging because objects with different materials exhibit distinct deformation and contact dynamics. While diffusion policies provide a powerful framework for modeling multimodal manipulation behaviors, they typically lack explicit physical reasoning and may produce averaged actions when facing heterogeneous objects. We present a physics-aware diffusion policy that augments visual imitation learning with object physical understanding. Our framework recovers material properties from visual demonstrations by coupling …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04485 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) provide semantic cues such as depth and segmentation useful for robotic manipulation, but directly deploying them in closed-loop control is impractical due to high computational cost, temporal inconsistency, and distribution shift between static internet images and egocentric robot observations. We propose All-For-One (AFO), a two-stage distillation framework that leverages VFMs strictly as privileged information during training, using downstream robotic data. Following the privileged learning paradigm, AFO decouples semantic representation learning from …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04477 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Diffusion-based policies have achieved strong performance on single-task robotic manipulation. However, a single model trained jointly on multiple tasks consistently underperforms the per-task specialists trained on the same demonstrations. We focus on two challenges. First, the convolutional encoders commonly used in diffusion-based policies produce visual conditions that are not discriminative enough. Second, gradients from incompatible action modes update the shared denoiser's dense parameters along the same directions, causing destructive interference during joint training. To address …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04176 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

This paper presents an innovative guidance and control method for a space manipulator that actively maneuvers its base to hold a tumbling object stationary relative to the base during proximity operations. This simplifies motion planning, reduces collision risk, and enables impact-free capture using single- or multi-arm configurations, with or without predefined grasping interfaces. The proposed approach involves two phases. In the pre-grasping phase, a synchronization control aligns the target's center of mass (CoM) with the system's instantaneous center of rotation (ICR), virtually …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04093 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Object rearrangement planning in cluttered environments is often non-monotone, requiring objects to be temporarily relocated before reaching their final destinations. Although search-based planners can solve such tasks, they incur substantial computational cost and require expensive replanning when the environment changes. We propose the Visual Adaptive Rearrangement Planner (VARP), which learns non-monotone rearrangement directly from visual state representations generated from expert demonstrations. VARP predicts pick-and-place actions from the current and goal visual state representations, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04083 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

As robot learning moves beyond the tabletop, many tasks require mobility, adjustable reach, active perception, and bimanual dexterity. Commercial platforms combining these capabilities are costly, while affordable open-source alternatives cover only a subset and require software integration. We present MABEL, an open-source anthropomorphic mobile bimanual robot with 56 degrees of freedom (DOF) and a US$8.1k parts cost. It combines two 7-DOF arms with 17-DOF hands, a pitching torso, a lift, a 3-DOF neck, and a holonomic base. Back-drivable arms and torso support compliant interaction, with …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04080 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

A mobile manipulator asked to "put the toys away in the toy box" must decide which objects are toys and which container the user means, then find base poses, grasps, and placements it can execute. Because a scene representation is built before the instruction is known, it may lack the attributes, affordances, or concepts needed to resolve the task. We present FEIJOA, a language-model agent that grounds the instruction at test time. It queries a grounding tool over a posed RGB-D scan, inspects the returned candidates, and refines its queries until they resolve the instruction. An …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03825 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

In robotics, shape control, or shape servoing, refers to the automatic manipulation of a deformable object toward a desired shape. This article is the second of a two-part tutorial on data-driven, Jacobian-based shape control, in which the deformation Jacobian, a local model of how robot motion changes the measured shape, is estimated from measurements. Part I built the shape-servoing loop and derived a local stability condition. This paper starts by using the singular value decomposition of the deformation Jacobian to identify shape changes that can be produced by small robot motions, those …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03815 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

AIRoA-0 (A-0) is a bimanual manipulation system learned from 16,151 hours of handheld demonstrations, with no robot data collected at any stage. The demonstrations are recorded with YUBI, our open-source handheld gripper, which lets people record manipulation data anywhere with no robot present. From a single instruction, A-0 sorts more than a dozen small parts into their numbered cells and changes the mop pads and brush of a robot vacuum; among other tasks, it unzips a pencil case and folds a towel. It performs these tasks using only a camera on each wrist, with no head or scene camera, at a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03779 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Training robot policies for multi-task pick and place requires demonstrations on many objects, which handheld Universal Manipulation Interfaces (UMIs) can collect quickly and cheaply. However, existing UMIs depend on external base stations, use rigid fingers that give no signal about contact forces, or use parallel-jaw fingers that limit grip strength. We present a battery-powered handheld interface, built on YUBI, whose soft, angled fingers wrap around objects, deform visibly under load as a visual proxy for force, and match the grippers of the robot. With it, we collect a 99.7-hour dataset …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05941 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Visuomotor policies trained via behavior cloning are vulnerable to covariate shift, where small deviations from expert trajectories can compound into failure. Common strategies to mitigate this issue involve expanding the training distribution through human-in-the-loop corrections or synthetic data augmentation. However, these approaches are often labor-intensive, rely on strong task assumptions, or compromise the quality of imitation. We introduce Latent Policy Barrier, a framework for robust visuomotor policy learning. Inspired by Control Barrier Functions, LPB treats the latent embeddings …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03648 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

General-purpose mobile manipulation requires a combination of capable robot hardware, scalable demonstration collection, expressive whole-body control, and effective policy learning. Yet these components are often developed independently, creating mismatches that limit the capabilities of the complete system. We present Pixel, a co-designed full-stack system for learning general-purpose mobile manipulation. Pixel combines a low-cost wheeled humanoid with human-aligned kinematics and compliant grippers, multiple teleoperation and robot-free human data-collection interfaces, a unified …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03647 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Sensorized human demonstrations offer scalable data for mobile manipulation, but embodiment differences complicate policy learning. We present Pixel-UMI, a pipeline for learning environment-aware whole-body policies from human data. We first introduce Environment-Aware Retargeting (EAR), which combines reconstructed scene geometry with demonstrated head and gripper trajectories to determine robot posture and generate collision-aware joint and base targets. Delay-calibrated action assignment converts these trajectories into actions. However, kinematic differences can leave residual pose …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03584 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Open-world robotic mobile manipulation requires acting in physical environments with only partial information. While recent Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) agents show strong open-world reasoning capabilities, existing architectures that rely on direct tool calling struggle with geometric uncertainty and thus are limited to fully-observable tabletop environments. In contrast, Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) systems can solve long-horizon tasks under partial observability but incur high computational costs and require closed worlds. We propose \textbf{TAMPAgent}, an agentic planning …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03520 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Contact-rich manipulation benefits from tactile feedback that captures both detailed contact geometry and interaction forces. When scooping grains, contact patterns help infer spoon orientation, while resistance transmitted through the grasp guides motion. To provide these complementary sensing capabilities, we present PanoTac, a low-cost, compliant tactile fingertip designed for dense three-axis tactile sensing. Each fingertip provides a $12 \times 32 \times 3$ tactile representation, with one normal ($z$) and two shear ($x$, $y$) response components at each taxel. The sensor operates at 60 …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03489 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Pre-touch sensing, or sensing information about an object before contact, is an attractive modality for robot hands as it can allow a robot to anticipate and respond to a contact before it happens. In this work, we introduce ToFTouch, a multimodal tactile sensor combining three multizone (4$\times$4 resolution) time-of-flight sensors with an optics-based pressure sensing array. We mount this sensor on a parallel jaw gripper and demonstrate its utility on three distinct tasks: (i) pre-grasp adjustment, (ii) item extraction from clutter, and (iii) item insertion into tight spaces. For pre-grasp …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03294 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Contact-rich manipulation requires fine-grained control and complex physical interactions with the environment, posing significant challenges for robot policy learning. Vision-only policies struggle with such tasks, as contact states and interaction forces are difficult to infer from visual observations alone. Existing methods mitigate this issue by incorporating force or tactile sensing. However, they often treat these signals as auxiliary observations without fully exploiting their role in modeling future interaction dynamics. To address this, we propose ForceLDM, a force-aware latent …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03268 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Many manipulation goals are easier to visualize than to specify numerically through explicit geometric constraints. We present VerifLM, a framework that converts image-edited goal configurations into physically verified 6-DoF object poses for planning. Using an edited image, VerifLM recovers an initial relative pose between an active object and a passive object, then prompts a vision-language model to generate axis-wise sampling constraints and a task-specific validation program. Candidate poses are evaluated in a physics simulator, and the VLM selects the most task-consistent retained …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03163 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Fine-grained manipulation couples instruction grounding, local visual precision, and sustained execution. We present FineCraft, a framework that adapts pretrained models for fine-grained manipulation in the MetaFine Challenge. A task-routed mixture of policies selects independently adapted DINOv2-DiT or pretrained $π_{0.5}$ policies through a common observation-action interface. Local visual features help identify the instructed object parts, demonstrations and expert continuations teach the required actions, and new observations guide replanning during execution. FineCraft ranks fourth with …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03091 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

KlaskTron is an open-hardware physical platform for two-player adversarial reinforcement learning, with a learned actuator model that supports zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of trained policies. Building on this platform, we contribute KlaskTron-IL: a multi-tier imitation learning dataset (80k human demonstration timesteps collected directly on the physical robot, 320k symmetry-augmented timesteps, and synthetic expert trajectories up to 5M steps generated by the zero-shot-validated PPO policy), and diagnostic baselines that expose three characteristic failure modes of standard IL methods …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03059 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Contact-based robotic manipulation is constrained by end-effector reachability and the mechanical properties of objects. Airflow can exert forces without direct robot-object contact, enabling manipulation of objects beyond the reach or when direct contact is undesirable. However, the lack of suitable simulation has hindered the application of reinforcement learning to airflow-based manipulation, limiting the broader adoption of this mechanism compared with contact-based methods. To address this gap, we developed a robot- and task-agnostic airflow extension for Isaac Lab that supports …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02968 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Contact transitions allow humanoid robots to redistribute object support across the whole body, enabling manipulation beyond hand-only grasps. Human videos provide a scalable source of such transitions for robots to learn from. However, body occlusion disrupts object pose tracking and corrupts retargeted motion. Moreover, accurately reproducing the object trajectory does not ensure that the robot applies stabilizing forces at the intended contacts, risking slips or drops in later phases. To address these challenges, we propose ReContact, which reconstructs and retargets human-object …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02930 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Generalization remains a central challenge in robotics, calling for policies that address domain variations from multiple dimensions such as diverse embodiments, camera poses, and/or scene layouts. In order to approach this problem, we introduce PointPilot, a task-focused and 3D aligned manipulation framework built on a 3D space point-flow prediction. Rather than modeling the global scene, PointPilot only represents task-focused objects (robot grippers treated as objects), avoiding the prediction of potentially redundant scene parts unrelated to the manipulation tasks. Moreover, PointPilot …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02794 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Robust multimodal perception for soft robotic grasping is challenged by modality-dependent noise, semantic ambiguity, and limited coordinated multisensory data. We introduce Soma, a dataset containing 100 objects, 1,000 continuous grasping trajectories, and 74,914 multimodal samples grouped by software acquisition cycle, spanning remote RGB, hand RGB, depth, tactile, IMU, and structured text observations. We also collect Soma-Success, an independent grasp-outcome dataset with 1,000 trials (998 retained after quality control), to evaluate frozen-encoder transfer for post-hoc grasp outcome …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02677 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Long-horizon robotic assembly requires reliable perception and action across grasping, alignment, and insertion. Vision captures global object pose and scene context, where as fingertip touch provides local contact cues that are especially useful as contact states change. We present a visuotactile diffusion policy that combines four-step histories from two camera views and two fingertip tactile images to condition action-sequence generation. A recurrent temporal representation integrates recent observations from both modalities. To encourage it to capture how contact evolves under action, an …