Tactile sensing is essential for robots to achieve human-like gentle manipulation. However, existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models struggle to exploit tactile feedback for gentle manipulation due to scarce aligned vision-tactile-language data and the lack of effective closed-loop force feedback mechanisms. To address these challenges, we introduce Tabero, a benchmark and model suite for gentle, language-conditioned robotic manipulation that demands fine-grained contact force perception. First, the Tabero benchmark addresses the scarcity of tactile data by presenting a data-efficient pipeline that repurposes open-source robot manipulation trajectories to generate diverse vision-tactile-language tasks, and establishes a multidimensional evaluation protocol that measures task success alongside physical interaction quality. Second, we propose Tabero-VTLA, an architecture with a decoupled force-position command interface; the resulting force-position commands are executed by a fixed hybrid controller to enable real-time, force-aware manipulation. Evaluated on Tabero, our model maintains high task success while reducing average grip force by over 70% under gentle instructions, demonstrating its ability to modulate interaction forces based on multimodal experience. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/NathanWu7/Tabero.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong performance across diverse robotic manipulation tasks, yet their predominantly vision-centric perception and position-controlled execution remain insufficient for contact-rich manipulation. Visual observations alone often provide limited evidence of contact onset and interaction magnitude, while position-control policies cannot respond compliantly to rapidly changing contact dynamics. To bridge both the perception and control gaps, we propose TAO-Force, a force-conditioned VLA framework that combines force-aware policy learning with contact-regulated execution. For force-aware perception, TAO-Force introduces Force-conditioned Feature-wise Linear Modulation (F-FiLM) to inject encoded force feedback into the representations of a frozen pretrained visual-language backbone while preserving its semantic priors. For responsive control, it employs a contact-gated fast-slow architecture, with a slow position-control branch tracking nominal trajectories during non-contact phases and a fast admittance-control branch regulating physical interaction during contact phases. Detailed analyses on a force-perception task and real-world evaluations across four contact-rich manipulation tasks validate the effectiveness and robustness of TAO-Force.
Fusing tactile signals has proven effective for contact-rich manipulation, enabling robots to perceive contact states and adapt to rapidly changing physical interactions. Yet effectively integrating tactile feedback into dexterous manipulation remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce ReTouch, a vision-language-action model (VLA) that supports contact-rich dexterous manipulation through tactile predictions continually refined online using execution-time feedback. ReTouch builds on two main innovations for tactile representation and closed-loop action generation. First, its Tactile-Patch Encoder represents tactile observations as structured tactile patch features that preserve finger identity and local contact structure, providing contact cues for fine-grained dexterous control. Second, its high-frequency action module jointly predicts future tactile states and action chunks and refines both using incoming tactile feedback during execution. This closed-loop refinement keeps tactile predictions aligned with evolving physical interactions, enabling responsive action correction and improving robustness to contact changes and execution errors. We further introduce XHT-Dataset, comprising 900 real-world demonstrations across seven contact-rich tasks collected on an XHand--UR7e platform, and evaluate ReTouch through closed-loop real-robot experiments. ReTouch surpasses the strongest baseline by 18.4 and 23.8 percentage points in average success rate under standard and challenging conditions, respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness.
Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong visual, language, and action priors for robot manipulation, but visual observations alone often miss the local contact state required for contact-rich tasks. We present TacCoRL, a scalable framework that injects Tactile feedback into VLA policies and improves them through sim-real Co-training and simulation-based reinforcement learning (RL), without requiring large-scale tactile pretraining or extensive real-world contact exploration. The key idea is not only adding touch as an input, but learning how contact readings should modulate action responses in near-failure states that are rare in demonstrations and risky to collect on hardware. We use a real-aligned simulator as a closed-loop training environment for contact interaction. Mixed simulated and real trajectories first warm-start tactile-conditioned actions in the pretrained policy. Reinforcement learning with verifiable task rewards then optimizes the policy using simulated contact rollouts. It reinforces tactile-conditioned actions that lead to task completion, while a supervised objective on real trajectories keeps the refined policy anchored to deployment visual, tactile, and action distributions. The resulting policy transfers directly to the real robot without privileged simulation state or online real-world RL. Across four bimanual contact-rich tasks, the final visuo-tactile policy achieves an average success rate of 72.5%, compared to baseline of 50.0%. Result videos and more details are available at https://tac-corl.github.io/