FlowTouch: View-Invariant Visuo-Tactile Prediction

Touch is fundamental to dexterous manipulation, yet most egocentric human data increasingly used for robot learning lacks tactile information. Directly collecting large-scale tactile data is challenging due to sensor limitations, while human video data is abundant, contact-rich, and easily scalable. This motivates a natural question: can tactile signals be inferred purely from vision? To address this, we introduce EgoTac, a generalizable model that predicts rich tactile information directly from egocentric human videos. EgoTac is trained on a unified corpus of over 5.7M image-tactile pairs, covering both continuous force measurements and binary contacts. By learning from this diverse dataset, EgoTac captures nuanced touch dynamics across varied interactions. Experiments demonstrate strong performance: in-domain prediction achieves an average force error below 0.06N. On out-of-domain contact prediction benchmarks, EgoTac consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art contact estimator. It also captures the rise and fall patterns of real tactile data and enables zero-shot predictions on unconstrained real-world videos. Scaling analyses further reveal that both data diversity and volume improve performance steadily. Overall, EgoTac provides a scalable pathway to extract tactile priors from egocentric human videos, enabling broadly applicable tactile-aware robot learning. Related resources can be found at https://egotac.github.io/ .

Contact-rich manipulation benefits from tactile feedback, yet physical tactile sensors introduce hardware, calibration, synchronization, and maintenance costs that complicate policy learning and deployment. We formulate predicted touch as an alternative to measured tactile input and present PredTac, a framework that learns to infer tactile states from causal visual observations and robot states and uses the predicted touch as an explicit interface for policy learning and execution. A tactile predictor is first trained with tactile supervision and then used to provide contact information without requiring measured tactile input during downstream policy training or execution. We evaluate PredTac across three contact-rich manipulation tasks in simulation and on a real robot, and further examine how policy performance depends on the predicted contact content. In simulation goal-offset evaluations, predicted-touch policies achieve 27.0%, 52.0%, and 44.7% success on USB, Barbed-spike, and Valve, respectively, improving over the visual baseline by 8.0-13.7 percentage points. On the real robot, predicted-touch ACT achieves 70.0%, 50.0%, and 90.0% success on USB insertion, Barbed extraction, and Valve rotation, respectively, with a three-task mean of 70.0%, approaching measured-touch ACT at 72.2% and substantially outperforming visual ACT at 21.1%. Fixed-policy interventions further show that performance is sensitive to the spatial structure of predicted contact, with spatial rearrangement at fixed value distributions reducing Valve success by 10.7 percentage points. These results demonstrate that predicted touch can provide useful contact information for contact-rich manipulation without requiring tactile sensing as a policy input.

Tactile sensing can improve performance in contact-rich robot manipulation. However, learning policies that use real tactile feedback typically requires demonstrations collected with tactile-equipped hardware. We present Feature-Extracted Latent Tactile (FELT), a framework that uses existing paired visuo-tactile data to learn contact-aware representations from RGB observations. FELT provides these representations to downstream policies through two interfaces: generated tactile images and contact-aware features. FELT combines a frozen visual encoder with separate query decoders for the left and right finger, reflecting the spatial organization of dual-finger tactile arrays. The two branches exchange information through gated connections, and a convolutional readout produces spatial contact representations for the downstream interfaces. For downstream manipulation, the image interface decodes these spatial representations into tactile images, allowing policies trained with either real or generated tactile observations to use generated images at deployment. Alternatively, the feature interface feeds these representations directly to the policy during both training and deployment, without real tactile observations. Experiments on four contact-rich real-robot tasks show that both interfaces achieve higher success rates than vision-only policies. Directly incorporating learned contact-aware features into the policy improves success by 15-22.5 percentage points across the four tasks.