Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

Ask about this topic

Overview

This field studies how robots make and maintain useful contact with objects, where small errors in force, alignment, or friction can cause failure or damage. Approaches include tactile- and force-aware imitation learning and reinforcement learning, compliant and hybrid force-position control, contact-dynamics models, and planning methods that reason over contact modes. Recent work also brings these capabilities into vision-language-action policies and predictive world models, often using tactile feedback for fast corrections while vision guides the broader task. A central challenge is making policies safe and reliable across unseen objects, sensors, and real-world contact conditions, since more sensing or higher simulation fidelity does not consistently improve every task.

Latest papers

CardsList

420 papers78 papers in the last four weeks, down 4% on the four weeks before. 0.5% of all new papers.

  1. SwapBot: Tool-Centric Robot Manipulation via Interchangeable End-Effectors and Tactile Sensing

    Oct 29, 2026Yunchu Zhang, Ray Song, Junhan Jiao +6Robotic Tool UseContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    University of Washington

  2. DAWN: Diffusion-based Alignment and unfastening Workflow Network

    Oct 29, 2026Hemant Kumar, Piyush Goenka, Nikhil ChopraRobotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

  3. TouchBridge: Tactile-Conditioned Human-to-Robot Transfer for Dexterous Manipulation

    Oct 29, 2026Haozhe Zhang, Gu Zhang, Zirui Zou +7Robotic ManipulationCross-Embodiment Robot Learning

    Tsinghua University · Zhejiang University · Nanyang Technological University +2

  4. AcrossDEX 1.0: From Human Motion Pretraining to Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation across Hand Embodiments

    Oct 29, 2026Xiaoyu Yang, Nan WuRobotic ManipulationBimanual Robotic Manipulation

  5. Kinematic-Tactile Aligned Dexterous Retargeting with Contact Wrench Space Alignment

    Oct 29, 2026Xinyuan He, Ziheng Xu, Yueyuan Chen +6Motion RetargetingDexterous Manipulation

    State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China · College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China · International Collaboration for Creative Research Teams, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China +1

  6. Keeping Contact: Task-Adaptive Friction Margins for Bimanual Non-Prehensile Manipulation

    Oct 27, 2026Qian Ying Lee, Lin Yang, Domenico CampoloNon-Prehensile Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. · R3 Institute (R3I) Singapore, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore

  7. On Shaky Ground: Characterising Non-Rigid Base Effects in Mobile Manipulation

    Oct 27, 2026Zongyuan Zhang, Christopher Lehnert, Will N. Browne +1Mobile ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Faculty of Engineering, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George St, Brisbane, QLD 4000, Australia · Australian Cobotics Centre, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George St, Brisbane, QLD 4000, Australia · QUT Centre for Robotics, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George St, Brisbane, QLD 4000, Australia

  8. CARD: Contact-Anchored Retargeting for Dexterous Manipulation

    Oct 27, 2026Cunxi Dai, Botao He, Francois R Hogan +7Motion RetargetingHuman-to-Robot Motion Imitation

    Carnegie Mellon University · Amazon Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR) · University of Maryland, College Park +1

  9. How High Can GPT-6 Astra Climb in Contact-Rich Manipulation? PhysLadder: A Hierarchical, Matched Sim-Real Benchmark for Physical Interaction

    Oct 25, 2026Haibao Yu, Jiaqi Meng, Zijian Zhang +16Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobot Manipulation Benchmarks

    Tuojing Intelligence · The University of Hong Kong · Chinese Academy of Sciences +10

  10. AdaDexTrack: Dynamic Modulation for Adaptive and Generalizable Dexterous Manipulation Tracking

    Oct 24, 2026Jianibieke Adalibieke, Qianwei Han, Xueyi Liu +2Language-Conditioned Robot ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute · Tsinghua University · UC San Diego

  11. FORCA: A Force-Aware Coding Agent for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation

    Oct 22, 2026Xiao Tan, Yixuan Wang, Zhexi Wang +1Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationCode Generation for Robotics

    All authors are with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA. · Zhexi Wang is also with Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

  12. AstroBench: Benchmarking Free-Floating Capture and Space Robotic Manipulation

    Oct 22, 2026Zizhe Wang, Jia Deng, Xin Lu +3Space RoboticsRobot Manipulation Benchmarks

    Astroup Lab, Beijing, China · Harbin Institute of Technology, Beijing Research Institute

  13. Motion Retargeting with Spatiotemporal Preferences for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

    Oct 21, 2026Xiongbo Shi, Shihang Du, Zongyou Yu +6Motion RetargetingHumanoid Robot Control

    Physical Intelligence Lab, Tongji University, Shanghai, China. · Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai, China. · RobotScale.AI.

  14. CW-WAM: A Structured Contact-Wrench World Action Model for Force-Sensitive Manipulation

    Oct 21, 2026Houzhu Ding, Xinda Qi, Luqi Wang +1Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationWorld Action Models

    Ant Group

  15. DONIC: Generalist Dexterous Bimanual Tracking Control from Human Demonstrations

    Oct 21, 2026Mingze Sun, Ziang Cao, Yuan Fei +8Bimanual Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

  16. Training in Deployment: Human-in-the-loop Online Post-Training for Robot Manipulation

    Oct 21, 2026Chun Gu, Xiaofei Wei, Yiming Chen +4Robot LearningHuman-in-the-Loop AI

    School of Data Science, Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · Logos Robotics Group +1

  17. T-WLA: Bridging Slow Vision and Fast Touch

    Oct 20, 2026Kaichen Zhou, Yuzhen Chen, Hannah Yao +14Tactile-Vision-Language-Action ModelsContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Harvard University · University of California, Davis +1

  18. GPT-6-Astra Understands Touch and Outperform Vision--Tactile--Language--Action Models

    Oct 20, 2026Ziyong Wang, Yupei Lin, Runxuan Huang +3Tactile-Vision-Language-Action ModelsRobot Policy Learning

    Sun Yat-sen University · X-Era AI Lab · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

  19. Embodied Task Agents Can Perform Fine Manipulation through Tactile In-Context Learning

    Oct 20, 2026Yubang Wang, Zezheng Huai, Yifei Zhang +8Robotic ManipulationICL for Robotics

    Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · Tencent +3

  20. GPT-6 Astra Is a Native Visuo-Tactile Policy for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Oct 19, 2026Chen Yang, Linzhe Shi, Hang Zhang +3Robotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Tsinghua University · Amap, Alibaba Group

  21. DexOAK: Object-Aware Kinematic Retargeting

    Oct 19, 2026Federica Spinola, Robert Katzschmann, Cordelia SchmidMotion RetargetingHuman-to-Robot Motion Imitation

    Inria and the Departement d’Informatique of Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL University, France · Soft Robotics Lab, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

  22. ContactBench 1.0: A Benchmark for Everyday Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Oct 17, 2026Jingyi Xiang, Yixuan Wang, Jeannette Bohg +1Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobot Manipulation Benchmarks

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA · Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA

  23. Touch Where It Matters: Learning Local Tactile Policies for Fine-Grained Gripper Control

    Oct 17, 2026Mingyuan Ba, Yanan Zhou, James Zhao +1Robotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, Australia

  24. ACTS: Learning Visuo-Tactile World Models from Human Physical Interaction

    Oct 16, 2026Yuxiang Ma, Weihan Xu, Pengfei Ye +5Tactile World ModelsContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology · University of Washington · Harvard University +2

  25. Evaluating Lightweight Contact Feedback in Dual-Operator Collaborative Humanoid Teleoperation

    Oct 16, 2026Austin Graves, Chuizheng Kong, Yunho Cho +4Robot TeleoperationHaptic Feedback for Robot Teleoperation

    1Symbiotic and Augmented Intelligence Lab, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA. · 2Robot Danger Lab, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.

  26. Blind Precise Assembly: Proprioceptive Sim-to-Real Peg-in-Hole for Diverse Parts

    Oct 16, 2026Antonia Bronars, Younghyo Park, Kushal Kedia +1Robotic AssemblyRobotic Manipulation

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  27. Ego2Contact: Predicting Touch from Egocentric Human Video for Contact-Rich Robot Manipulation

    Oct 16, 2026Qianqian Yang, Dayou Li, Bangya Liu +11Visual-to-Tactile PredictionVision-Based Tactile Sensing

    Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. · Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA. · UW-Madison, Madison, WI, USA. +1

  28. PlayPolicy: Dexterity from Supervised Play

    Oct 15, 2026Botao He, Yiming Dou, Yiannis Aloimonos +3Robot LearningContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Amazon Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR). · University of Maryland, College Park.

  29. MAIA: Anticipating Interaction Anomalies in Contact-Rich Manipulation via Multimodal World Models

    Oct 15, 2026Yi Qiao, Maolin Zheng, Haoran Sun +2Anomaly DetectionContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  30. CQDC-Warp: GPU-Accelerated Differentiable Quasi-Dynamic Simulation for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Oct 15, 2026Yanchen Ding, Jiayi Chen, Jianfeng Xu +3Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationTrajectory Optimization

    Peking University · Galbot · Tsinghua University