https://embodied-ai-radar.com/topics/tactile.xml 2026-11-10T00:00:00ZEmbodied AI Radar 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/2611.12695 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Woody breast (WB) myopathy is a spatially heterogeneous fibro-degenerative condition of the broiler Pectoralis major muscle. Existing mechanical reference methods rely on single-point or sequential compression measurements, limiting characterization of spatial hardness variability. This study presents TACTUS (Tactile Adaptive Conformal 3D Uniform Sensing), an automated tactile array that generates thickness-normalized, three-dimensional hardness maps at 20 anatomically distributed locations within approximately 30 s. TACTUS integrates 20 independently motorized tactuators with force-sensing …

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/2611.10967 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/2611.10647 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/2611.10490 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/2611.09708 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Wearable haptic interfaces deliver physical stimuli to the skin, yet perceived locations vary widely across users and diverge from actuator locations, particularly for emergent tactile-feedback techniques. We developed a wearable haptic input/output (I/O) device integrating a 36-channel electrotactile array with capacitive touch sensing, enabling stimulation and user-reported percept locations to be registered within the same body-referenced coordinate frame. In 24 participants, the device revealed electrotactile and referred-thermal perceptual maps with notable interparticipant variability. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09293 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Recently, world-action models (WAMs) have emerged as a powerful framework for robot manipulation. By jointly modeling action generation and future observation prediction, WAMs can act and anticipate the outcomes of the actions. However, existing WAMs typically rely on frozen pretrained encoders trained with reconstruction, which may not produce representations well suited for robot control. In this paper, we tackle the problem of learning physicallygrounded, control-relevant representations for WAMs. We propose MDF++, a visuo-tactile world-action model that learns latent representations of …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09129 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Egocentric video captures human-object interaction at scale but rarely includes tactile labels for hidden contact and pressure. We introduce TouchAnnotator, an ego-only bimanual tactile annotator trained with multi-source tactile supervision and privileged-view distillation. A canonical hand field unifies glove pressure, geometry-derived human contact, and robot fingertip deformation from six datasets and three embodiments, while source-aware masks preserve valid targets. During training, an EMA teacher observes synchronized ego and wrist views and distills hand-local representations and …

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/2611.08872 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

In recent years, massively parallelized rigid-body simulation has played a central role in robotics research, enabling rapid progress in areas such as reinforcement learning, stochastic optimal control, and randomized smoothing-based trajectory optimization. Particularly in contact-rich settings, the scalability of such simulations in large part depends on well-optimized representations of collision geometry, often requiring a coarse approximation of the underlying surfaces using primitives such as spheres, capsules, cylinders, and boxes. Whenever the complexity of the surfaces or the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08398 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Haptic interactions, such as touching an object in virtual reality, involve detecting a plethora of sensations through the skin. Whilst tactile displays exist to simulate and manipulate all of these cues individually, little progress has been made constructing devices that can control multiple cues simultaneously. This paper presents a tactile display technology that offers both softness and temperature change. A prototype display, based on particle jamming and the thermal transfer of heated and cooled water, is evaluated in terms of its ability to change both stiffness and temperature. …

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/2611.07532 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/2611.06689 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/2611.05936 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Integrating six-axis tactile feedback into robotic interfaces requires compact sensors with accurate load measurement and rapid online reconstruction. This paper presents LumiTac, a low-profile, camera-free optoelectronic tactile sensor combining spatially distributed illumination with spectral encoding. Five photoemitters and five RGBW photoreceivers are mounted on opposing circuit boards coupled through translucent silicone. Load-induced interlayer motion modulates the internal light field under compression, shear, bending, and torsion. The sensing head measures 12 mm in diameter and 4.75 …

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/2611.05741 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Motor responses evoked by noxious stimulation are used to assess neurological function in hospitalized patients with disorders of consciousness. In standard bedside assessments, these stimuli are applied manually, resulting in substantial variation in force, duration, frequency, and location. Here, we present OUCH (Objective, Uniform, Controlled Haptic stimulation), a wrist-worn device that uses pneumatic actuation to deliver noxious mechanical stimuli. OUCH combines stacked pneumatic pouch actuators, a rigid indenter, and a compliant spacer designed to buckle at a set load, so that the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05027 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Multi-agent systems offer significant advantages in terms of flexibility and redundancy, enabling the efficient distribution of complex tasks among multiple robots. However, their deployment requires advanced control strategies to ensure optimal cooperation between autonomous agents and human operators. We propose a modification of the global connectivity maintenance algorithm to incorporate measurements taken in agent's local frame, using sensors with limited fields of view. This algorithm, responsible for the autonomous behavior of the multi-robot system, is combined with different adaptive …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04424 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Humanoid robots operating in cluttered environments must react to unexpected contacts before the first impact peak, which arrives within tens of milliseconds. Learned whole-body policies running at 50 Hz introduce a policy-cycle delay and may suppress a protective withdrawal as a tracking error. To address these challenges, we propose ARC (Ascending Reflex Control), a bottom-up framework that integrates instantaneous tactile reflexes with learned whole-body control. ARC consists of two components: an instantaneous reflex pathway and bottom-up reflex integration. The reflex pathway detects …

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/2611.03091 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/2611.02968 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/2611.02677 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 …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02140 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Mechanical hysteresis and pneumatic loading complicate contact force estimation from deformation measurements in soft robots. This work presents a 3D-printed polyether block amide (PEBA) Kresling cell with magnetic angular sensing that supports three operating modes: force sensing at zero gauge pressure, force sensing with tunable stiffness under gauge positive pressure, and self-sensing actuation under negative gauge pressure. A multiscale gated recurrent unit (GRU) network estimates contact force from angular histories to account for the the combined effects of geometric deformation and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01609 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Robotic surface exploration benefits from tactile interfaces that accommodate contact and capture variations in surface characteristics. Herein, we report MagPillar, a tactile sensor inspired by spider tactile hairs that combines a magnetic pillar array with three-axis Hall sensing. A full-array mechanical and magnetic-field model characterizes how pillar deformation affects the superposed fields measured across the array, providing a physical basis for interpreting its contact responses. The compliant pillar architecture translates contact with surface textures and geometric features into …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01483 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Tactile sensing plays a crucial role in everyday human interaction. Consider inserting a plug into a tight socket, vision alone provides limited guidance during the final insertion stage, and we instead rely on both anticipated contact and realized tactile feedback to ajust the insertion motion. The same capability is equally important for robots, particularly in dexterous manipulation tasks. Yet many contemporary robot policies remain vision-dominant. This visual bias, compounded by limited tactile data and sparse contact events, can cause directly incorporated tactile signals to be ignored …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00957 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Tactile sensing plays an important role in imitation learning for contact-rich manipulation by providing direct observations of physical contact with objects. Recently, several tactile foundation models (TFMs) have been proposed to learn general-purpose tactile representations through pretraining on large-scale tactile datasets. However, how these pretrained tactile representations should be leveraged for end-to-end imitation learning remains insufficiently explored. In this work, we integrate multiple TFMs into Diffusion Policy and systematically evaluate their effectiveness for contact-rich …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00898 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Opening the door of unsecured furniture loads the frictional contacts at its supports; too large a pull slides or tips the object. A friction-cone constraint on the commanded wrench removes this failure mode but costs haptic transparency. We quantify the trade-off: an admissible wrench set built from contact friction cones and support-polygon tipping margins is shrunk for robustness to bounded mass and friction errors, and any command in the shrunken set provably leaves the furniture static (Prop. 1). We call this map the robust friction cone projection (RFCP). RFCP and its haptic guard admit …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00455 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Tactile sensing provides robots with direct observations of contact physics, local geometry, and interaction dynamics, making it a vital source of feedback for contact-rich manipulation. However, existing tactile manipulation studies are often developed and evaluated within specific task settings, making it difficult to systematically compare how tactile information contributes under different interaction conditions. In this work, we develop a benchmark in simulation comprising 128 tasks organized around three complementary evaluation regimes: Precise, Recognition, and Dynamic. The benchmark …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40646 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Robot manipulation in everyday environments inherently involves substantial tool usage. Seemingly simple household tasks, such as cooking pan-fried tofu, require forceful cutting, delicate brushing, and precise placement using different tools under contact-rich interaction. Thus, the ability to autonomously swap and use task-appropriate tools is important for tool-centric manipulation. We introduce SwapBot, a modular, tool-centric end effector system featuring low-cost adapters that quickly convert common household tools into robot end effectors. Rather than pursuing a single universal …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40349 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Human demonstrations offer an efficient and scalable source of data for dexterous robot manipulation, but differences in sensing and hand morphology complicate the transfer of contact-rich interactions. We present TouchBridge, a hardware--software co-designed framework for human-to-robot data transformation. A wearable human demonstration interface and a corresponding robot interface establish cross-embodiment correspondence in visual and fingertip tactile sensing. We introduce Tac-Retarget, a tactile-conditioned retargeting method that uses measured contact to align fingertip contact patches …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39582 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Human demonstrations provide a natural and scalable source of data for learning dexterous manipulation policies. However, existing retargeting methods primarily transfer human kinematics, while the tactile information underlying physical interaction is rarely preserved across embodiments. To address this limitation, we present a hierarchical three-stage framework for kinematic-tactile aligned dexterous retargeting. We use object-centric contact wrench space as a physical representation for tactile alignment between human and robot hands. The framework first aligns hand kinematics and contact …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39076 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Collecting naturalistic human manipulation demonstrations with accurate contact force and hand pose is essential for robot dexterous manipulation policy and foundational world model learning - yet no existing wearable platform provides both calibrated fingertip force sensing and occlusion-resilient hand tracking in a form factor that preserves natural manipulation behavior. We present Tactus, a textile-integrated sensing glove that co-optimizes three design pillars: (1) a thin, conformal 3D-knit form factor (1.5 mm fingertip stackup) designed to minimize interference with natural …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35563 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Experts can master fine hand-object manipulation skills, yet limited conscious perception of rapid tactile interactions hinders their ability to articulate the underlying control mechanisms. Badminton racket control requires rapid, fine hand-force coordination, providing a demanding testbed for uncovering these mechanisms. An 864-node tactile-inertial glove with synchronized 100-Hz acquisition recorded over 14,000 strokes from more than 70 participants across five skills. Inspired by sensorimotor control, our mechanics-grounded two-layer framework inferred object-driving and grip-stabilizing …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34527 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

We introduce PhysLadder, a hierarchical Sim-Real benchmark for evaluating physical interaction capabilities in contact-rich manipulation. Its 16 household tasks span three cumulative levels: contact selection and geometric alignment (L1), force regulation within sustained contact (L2), and coordinated contact reconfiguration and force regulation (L3). Each task is instantiated in physically and visually matched simulated and real-world environments, with shared task definitions and success criteria. We evaluate GPT-6 Astra zero-shot with three trials per task in each environment. Real-world …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31841 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

Coding agents can translate language instructions into robot programs. For contact-rich manipulation, a key challenge is to generate and refine control logic that responds to physical interaction. We present FORCA, a coding agent that takes visual observations and wrist force/torque (F/T) measurements as input to write Python programs for contact probing and force-responsive motion. Between executions, the agent inspects force records alongside visual outcomes to diagnose failures and revise both motion and force-feedback control logic. FORCA requires no demonstrations, task-specific …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31661 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

We present OpenTac, a novel sensor and a full-stack ecosystem for tactile skins that are highly customizable, scalable, and readily deployed in downstream robot control and learning applications. Our core contribution is twofold. First, we develop a scalable resistive tactile skin with a structured deformable overlay that converts tangential loading into spatially varying pressure. Differential responses across neighboring "taxels" support decoding of local shear vectors, and the common-mode response encodes normal force. Second, we provide a highly customizable sensor design tool that is …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31472 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Tactile sensing provides robots with contact information difficult to obtain from vision alone. Shear force is particularly important for understanding tangential contact, guiding corrective motions, and maintaining grasp stability, yet flexible and low-cost tactile arrays often measure only normal force. We introduce VecTile, a low-cost, 6 mm thin, flexible tactile array capable of three-axis force sensing. VecTile combines a piezoresistive layer with passive silicone nubs that convert normal and shear forces into distinguishable pressure patterns. The sensor can be fabricated in-house …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31334 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Vision and touch provide complementary cues for object pose and local contact geometry, but external cameras are often occluded at the contact site. We present GelSlim 5.0, a fingertip sensor that acquires visual and tactile observations with one fixed camera and a continuous UV-responsive contact layer. By switching illumination, the camera sequentially acquires through-membrane visual images and contact-sensitive tactile images from a shared viewpoint, avoiding inter-camera extrinsic calibration. To combine these observations, we introduce VisTacFusion, a multimodal transformer with …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30438 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Tactile sensing provides robots with direct access to physical interactions at the contact interface, making it a critical modality for robust and dexterous manipulation. Over the past several decades, tactile-based manipulation research has evolved from mechanics-driven approaches, which explicitly interpret tactile signals through contact mechanics and task-specific reasoning, to data-driven approaches that learn tactile representations and manipulation policies directly from data. This paper reviews the development of tactile-based manipulation from these two complementary perspectives. We …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28814 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

In contact-rich manipulation, contact conditions can change before a visual policy updates its action plan. Recomputing the plan through the visual policy adds latency, while tactile feedback alone does not specify how the ongoing motion should be revised for the task. We introduce T-WLA, a world-language-action architecture that uses shared visual memory to guide both action generation and tactile correction. At each visual update, the visual branch integrates the current image, task instruction, and retrieved history into a visual memory that conditions base-action generation. The same …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28613 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Evaluating and post-training robot policies through physical interaction is costly and difficult to scale, motivating action-conditioned world models as interactive simulators. However, visually plausible predictions can misrepresent contact dynamics, providing unreliable feedback for policy evaluation and learning. We introduce PhysCanvas, a state-consistent visuo-tactile world model for contact-rich robot manipulation. PhysCanvas unifies multi-view RGB, tactile images, marker displacement, task state, and actions within a unified vision space. All modalities share a video VAE and pretrained …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28457 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

General-purpose multimodal models have shown promise as direct robot action policies, yet whether they grasp the physics underlying real-world interactions and can apply that understanding to guide action remains underexplored. We investigate this question using contact-rich manipulation as a representative testbed, examining tactile understanding as a concrete instance of this broader capability. Contact-rich manipulation requires interpreting tactile feedback and adjusting actions after obstruction. Existing learned tactile policies acquire these capabilities through specialized pretraining …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27995 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Tactile representation learning for dexterous manipulation often requires substantial robot-side data collection, limiting its scalability across different hands and sensors. We explore whether large-scale human hand-object interaction (HOI) data can provide a useful prior for robotic tactile learning. To this end, we propose HuTact, a framework that pretrains tactile-aware hand representations from human HOI data without requiring real tactile signals during pretraining. HuTact transfers the interaction structure learned from human hand motions to robotic tactile observations and can be …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27613 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Can embodied task agents use tactile experience to perform fine manipulation without task-specific model training? We investigate this capability through Tactile-ETA, a system that incorporates tactile experience into an embodied task agent through in-context learning. Successful expert demonstrations show how contact changes during manipulation. We pair each recorded robot movement with its camera views and bilateral tactile observations. We keep tactile observations at the start and end of each movement and add two neighboring time points when the tactile images change markedly in between. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27271 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Walking without vision requires timely, unambiguous guidance, yet many wearable aids encode directions as audio or vibrotactile signals that users must translate into movement. We present XoNav, a four-actuator hip exoskeleton that renders guidance cues directly at the hip joints. It renders an Advance cue and two-level Braking cues through sagittal-plane actuators and two-level Steering cues through frontal-plane actuators. A bilateral LSTM-based gait-state classifier uses two thigh-mounted IMUs to identify gait states, enabling haptic cues to be delivered in coordination with the wearer's …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26846 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Recent advances in multimodal models have enabled GPT-6 Astra to perform robotic manipulation through in-context learning. Yet contact-rich control and tactile perception are often regarded as strengths of specialist policies, leaving open whether Astra can directly understand and use tactile observations. We provide, to our knowledge, the first demonstration that Astra directly interprets vision-based tactile images and uses their contact cues for manipulation. Tactile RGB images enter through its existing visual interface, enabling few-shot closed-loop control on nineteen simulated UniVTAC …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26759 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Continuous in-hand rotation requires coordinated contact maintenance and renewal, linking manipulation performance to both hand geometry and tactile feedback. We investigate these relationships through rotational progress, finger participation, and fingertip loading on two versions of the low-cost LEAP Hand with anthropomorphic and symmetric finger arrangements. Both hands are integrated with TacTip vision-based tactile sensors and use a shared reinforcement learning framework. Simulation evaluates full tactile, binary touch, and proprioception-only observations on 12 unseen objects; hardware …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26174 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Tactile perception is crucial for precise robotic manipulation, providing an important foundation for dexterous, closed-loop force control. Among various tactile sensing techniques, magnetic tactile sensors stand out thanks to their fine-grained, three-dimensional force perception capability and strong robustness against visual occlusion. In this study, we discover a physical loophole called PhantomTac in magnetic tactile sensors. The attacker can alter the magnetic field, thus spoofing the force interpreted by magnetic tactile sensors. The attacker can stealthily deploy such an attack by …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25981 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Integrating force awareness into Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models involves not merely encoding wrench measurements as an additional modality, but determining when and how strongly physical interaction should influence robot action generation. Existing VLAs that use force typically inject it through a fixed pathway, without explicitly determining when it is relevant to the current action. This calls for an intermediate force relevance mechanism inside the VLA, in which visual-language context estimates the relevance of physical feedback to the current task before force enters the action …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24512 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Contact-rich manipulation is essential to everyday activities, yet evaluating robots' ability to perform these activities remains challenging because of their diverse contact behaviors and the difficulty of reproducing tasks across laboratories. Drawing on observations of everyday human manipulation, we identify eight recurring skill categories that provide a practical framework for studying these capabilities. We introduce ContactBench 1.0, an extensible benchmark that instantiates these skills through 36 reference tasks and more than 40 object assets. The assets capture task-relevant …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24485 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Visual imitation policies can organise task motion, yet contact-rich object use demands gripper adjustments beyond coarse opening and closing. We study fine-grained gripper control as a local feedback problem within ongoing task execution. Our approach assigns tactile feedback a dedicated control role during contact-rich task stages. We introduce ContactPolicy, a learned local controller that takes over the gripper while a visual base policy continues to control the arm. ContactPolicy combines tactile and force histories with current robot state to jointly predict gripper increments and their …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24285 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Abstract Action-conditioned world models for contact-rich manipulation require data that captures how contact forms, slides, and releases under varying force. Such data are slow to collect through robot teleoperation, which often lacks force feedback and is constrained by gripper geometry. We ask whether these dynamics can instead be learned from human physical interaction and transferred to a robot. We present ACTS, a visuo-tactile world model trained only on human interaction data. Operators manipulate handheld GelSight sensors while we record third-person and wrist video, tactile images, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23887 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Contact-rich insertion requires precise geometric alignment despite uncertainty in perception, geometry, and con- trol. When this uncertainty causes unintended contact, the re- sulting contact provides local information that can guide correc- tive motion. Sampling-based Model Predictive Control (SMPC) is well suited to this setting because it optimizes through forward simulation without requiring gradients through contact dynamics. However, standard SMPC methods typically use generic proposal distributions that do not exploit observed contact to determine where to search next. We introduce …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23849 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Every robot already carries high-resolution contact sensors: its own joints. Legged robots and humanoids exploit them to walk, run, and track whole-body motions without vision, but there the contacts are large and forceful. Is joint sensing also enough for precise, contact-rich assembly, where the robot must find a millimeter-scale opening, mesh gear teeth, or catch a thread through light contact? We study this question by training blind assembly policies that observe only a short history of joint positions, velocities, and their own actions, without visual, force, torque, or tactile sensing. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22932 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Contact locations and interaction forces are critical for contact-rich robot manipulation but are often ambiguous from vision alone. Measuring them on robots requires specialized tactile hardware and platform-specific data collection, which keeps robot tactile data scarce. Human egocentric video is far easier to scale but lacks touch. Recent predictors trained on egocentric recordings paired with tactile-glove measurements can predict this missing signal from video alone. These predictors, however, remain confined to human hands, which differ from robot hands in appearance and tactile layout. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22342 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

Generalist robot policies benefit from large-scale visual pretraining but often struggle with contact-rich dexterous manipulation, where force, compliance, and incipient slip are hard to observe from images. We present Spark-0, a spatially aligned vision-tactile-language-action (VTLA) model that uses touch in two complementary ways. During pretraining, image-space contact maps derived from tactile gloves, together with features from a frozen 3D geometry teacher, supervise the visual tokens; these objectives are removed at inference. In parallel, a tactile pathway encodes regional force …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21965 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

Realistic haptic rendering of viscoelastic materials requires reproducing time-dependent behaviors such as creep and stress relaxation, which arise from the material's inherent memory effects. Fractional-order viscoelastic models have been shown to capture these dynamics accurately and compactly, but it remains unclear whether their increased fidelity translates into perceptual benefits during haptic interaction. In this work, we investigate whether users perceive fractional-order models as more realistic than conventional integer-order models while rendering viscoelastic materials. We …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21686 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

Reliable contact-rich manipulation requires detecting execution deviations early enough for corrective action. Yet most monitoring methods are reactive, identifying anomalies only after they become observable. Anticipating such anomalies is challenging because visual observations only partially reveal physical interaction, while planned actions describe intended motion rather than their actual physical consequences. We address this problem with MAIA, a multimodal framework for anomaly anticipation. Its vision-action-force world model learns nominal interaction dynamics and predicts the visual …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21349 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

Efficient synthesis of contact-rich manipulation trajectories is essential for downstream robot learning. Gradient-based planning offers a promising approach, but jointly optimizing motion and contact decisions remains challenging. Meanwhile, many existing planners run on CPUs with limited throughput. We present CQDC-Warp, a GPU-accelerated differentiable quasi-dynamic simulator for batched model predictive control (MPC). We use it to study contact-guided trajectory optimization, in which intended robot--object contacts are specified before planning and encouraged through soft costs, while …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20320 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

Large-scale robot learning increasingly relies on diverse human demonstrations, yet tactile manipulation data remain difficult to scale, and existing multimodal datasets often lack consistent quality control and structured supervision. We present TacClaw-Infinity, a large-scale structured Vision-Tactile-Language-Action (VTLA) dataset for contact-rich manipulation, collected with TacClaw, a tactile-enabled UMI-style handheld interface that records synchronized visual observations, fingertip tactile signals, and end-effector trajectories without requiring a target robot during data collection. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20134 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

Tactile sensing is becoming central to robust, adaptive, and dexterous robotic manipulation. Beyond its traditional role in contact detection and reactive control, touch is increasingly used to learn transferable representations, condition manipulation policies, and support embodied physical reasoning. Yet existing surveys largely emphasize tactile hardware and perception, leaving the rapid shift toward learning-based tactile manipulation insufficiently synthesized. This paper reviews tactile-guided skill learning from a learning-centric perspective, organized by the functional role of touch …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19839 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

Robot-free collection with handheld interfaces enables scalable acquisition of human demonstrations for policy learning. However, existing handheld interfaces often provide limited intuitive force feedback, making contact-rich demonstration collection challenging for human operators. To address this, we present FOMI, a force-feedback manipulation interface with a scissor-shaped mechanism, which transmits object interaction forces directly to the operator's hands through actuation links without force sensors. This intuitive force feedback supports real-time action adjustment during robot-free …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18855 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Contact-rich manipulation requires robots to coordinate not only where to move, but also how contact and force should evolve throughout an interaction. Yet most robot policies represent actions primarily as motion trajectories, using tactile signals as inputs or auxiliary prediction targets without explicitly encoding contact dynamics in the action representation. We propose ILA (Interaction Latents as Actions), which uses decodable interaction latents that jointly capture the evolution of motion, contact, and force application as policy action units, providing a shared representation for …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18852 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Expert demonstrations show how to complete contact-rich tasks, but provide limited coverage of how interaction forces respond to different actions. Task-agnostic play provides broader experience of contact dynamics without specifying task goals. To fully leverage these two types of data, we introduce ForceWAM, a force world action model that decouples knowledge of task-compatible interaction outcomes from knowledge of how local actions change contact. A world model learns from successful demonstrations to jointly predict future video and six-axis force/torque trajectories. Together, these …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18848 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

In-context robot learning enables robots to acquire new behaviors from demonstrations without test-time parameter updates. However, visual and kinematic specifications alone may not distinguish contact-rich behaviors that share similar motions but require different interaction intensities or patterns. We propose Contact Trajectory Prompting (CTP), a framework for one-shot transfer of contact-rich manipulation behaviors. CTP encodes motion and contact information from a single demonstration into an ordered contact trajectory prompt that captures their temporal evolution and specifies the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18118 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Visually similar actions can produce contact loss, jamming, slippage, or irreversible damage, while tactile feedback may arrive after a critical transition. Contact-rich manipulation therefore requires generative policies to anticipate and evaluate whether candidate actions will produce desirable contact outcomes, then adjust action generation before execution. We present ForeTac, a predictive contact-guidance framework organized as a represent-predict-evaluate-guide loop. ForeTac encodes the current tactile state, predicts the tactile consequences of a candidate action sequence, and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17574 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Tracking object motion within a gripper provides essential feedback for robotic manipulation. However, limited contact coverage and uneven deformation make tactile estimation challenging. In this study, we present TacSpin, a method that tracks in-gripper object rotation on SO(3) using only two vision-based tactile sensors. The key idea is to estimate the axis and magnitude of the rotation response separately, rather than fitting a rigid-body model by least squares. Each finger's response is further refined with contact-boundary cues. The two fingers are then fused according to their …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17161 2026-10-12T00:00:00Z

Teleoperation is widely used to collect high-quality demonstrations for robot learning. Dexterous manipulation, however, requires coordinated control of motion and contact forces. Operators can specify motion, but struggle to reproduce the subtle force adjustments of human manipulation without feeling the robot's contacts. We introduce Force-Modulated Dexterity (FOMO-Dex), a unified compliance formulation for contact-rich manipulation. FOMO-Dex expresses nominal actions in coordinates defined by task geometry and contact structure. It applies force-driven motion corrections along selected …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16667 2026-10-12T00:00:00Z

Accurate modelling of soft tactile sensors remains difficult because finite element methods (FEM) are computa- tionally expensive, while real-time simulators often lack fidelity for hyperelastic deformation. Large physical datasets are also impractical to collect because repeated testing can damage fragile sensors. We present a data-efficient framework that combines limited real-world validation, high-fidelity FEM, and graph neural networks (GNNs) for accurate real-time prediction of two-dimensional tactile deformation in a planar soft tactile structure. The key idea is to decouple validation …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16463 2026-10-12T00:00:00Z

Vision-based tactile sensors enable fine-grained perception for dexterous robotic manipulation, but current marker-based designs tightly couple surface texture and contact force signals within a single observation. Existing data-driven decoupling methods rely on serial mask-based inpainting, which suffers from mask-sizing dilemmas caused by physical indentation effects, error retention, and lack of real paired data for supervision. To address these challenges, we propose DeTac, a novel dual-branch generative framework that concurrently extracts clean shading and marker images from a single …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16308 2026-10-12T00:00:00Z

Contact-rich insertion requires robots to combine visual alignment with tactile adjustment. However, existing visuotactile chunk-based policies collapse tactile feedback into a single generation-time fusion pathway, leaving persistent contact states, abrupt contact events, and future contact consequences implicitly modeled in a single representation. We present PACE (Phase-Aware Contact-Event Conditioning), a temporal-role tactile conditioning framework for chunk-based insertion policies. PACE organizes a shared tactile stream into three temporal roles: persistent contact states condition …