Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

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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. DexDrummer: In-Hand, Contact-Rich, and Long-Horizon Dexterous Robot Drumming

    Mar 23, 2026Hung-Chieh Fang, Amber Xie, Jennifer Grannen +2Dexterous ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Stanford University

  2. OmniVTA: Visuo-Tactile World Modeling for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 19, 2026Yuhang Zheng, Songen Gu, Yupeng Zheng +11Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationTactile World Models

    National University of Singapore · Fudan University · CASIA +4

  3. DexViTac: Collecting Human Visuo-Tactile-Kinematic Demonstrations for Contact-Rich Dexterous Manipulation

    Mar 18, 2026Xitong Chen, Yifeng Pan, Min Li +1Robotic Data CollectionContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China · Wuhan Huaweike Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., Wuhan, China

  4. Surface-Constrained Offline Warping with Contact-Aware Online Pose Projection for Safe Robotic Trajectory Execution

    Mar 17, 2026Farong Wang, Sai Swaminathan, Fei LiuRobot Motion GenerationRobot Trajectory Tracking

    All authors are with the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), Knoxville, TN 37996, USA.

  5. Efficient and Reliable Teleoperation through Real-to-Sim-to-Real Shared Autonomy

    Mar 17, 2026Shuo Sha, Yixuan Wang, Binghao Huang +2Robot TeleoperationShared Autonomy

    Columbia University · University of Pennsylvania

  6. BrickSim: A Physics-Based Simulator for Manipulating Interlocking Brick Assemblies

    Mar 17, 2026Haowei Wen, Ruixuan Liu, Weiyi Piao +2Physics-Based SimulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

  7. HapticVLA: Contact-Rich Manipulation via Vision-Language-Action Model without Inference-Time Tactile Sensing

    Mar 16, 2026Konstantin Gubernatorov, Mikhail Sannikov, Ilya Mikhalchuk +7Robotic ManipulationTactile-Vision-Language-Action Models

    Intelligent Space Robotics Laboratory, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow, Russia.

  8. ForceVLA2: Unleashing Hybrid Force-Position Control with Force Awareness for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Mar 16, 2026Yang Li, Zhaxizhuoma, Hongru Jiang +11Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationForce-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

    Tongji University · Shanghai AI Laboratory · Lumos Robotics +6

  9. Master Micro Residual Correction with Adaptive Tactile Fusion and Force-Mixed Control for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Mar 16, 2026Xingting Li, Yifan Xie, Han Liu +4Robotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Shenzhen Ubiquitous Data Enabling Key Lab, Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055, China. · School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China. · School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639956, Singapore.

  10. Tactile Modality Fusion for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Mar 15, 2026Charlotte Morissette, Amin Abyaneh, Wei-Di Chang +5Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

    McGill University, CAN · Mila - Québec AI Institute, CAN · NVIDIA, USA

  11. Stiffness Copilot: An Impedance Policy for Contact-Rich Teleoperation

    Mar 14, 2026Yeping Wang, Zhengtong Xu, Pornthep Preechayasomboon +4Robot TeleoperationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    All authors are with Meta Reality Labs Research · Yeping Wang is with University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA · Zhengtong Xu is with Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

  12. LDHP: Library-Driven Hierarchical Planning for Non-prehensile Dexterous Manipulation

    Mar 14, 2026Tierui He, Jiahui Zuo, Fumin Zhang +1Hierarchical PlanningContact-Rich Manipulation

    Shanghai Marine Equipment Research Institute, Shanghai 200031, China. · J. Zuo and F. Zhang are with The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong. · C. Zhao is with Jilin University, Changchun, China.

  13. GraspADMM: Improving Dexterous Grasp Synthesis via ADMM Optimization

    Mar 14, 2026Liangwang Ruan, Jiayi Chen, He Wang +1Robotic GraspingDexterous Manipulation

    School of Computer Science, Peking University. · Galbot. · School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University.

  14. TacVLA: Contact-Aware Tactile Fusion for Robust Vision-Language-Action Manipulation

    Mar 13, 2026Kaidi Zhang, Heng Zhang, Zhengtong Xu +7Tactile-Vision-Language-Action ModelsContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Kaidi, Heng, Zhengtong, Zhiyuan, Prince, Xiang, Xiaojing, Yuhao, and Yu are with the Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA · Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction Lab, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy. · Ph.D. program of national interest in Robotics and Intelligent Machines (DRIM) and Università di Genova, Genoa, Italy. +1

  15. Push, Press, Slide: Mode-Aware Planar Contact Manipulation via Reduced-Order Models

    Mar 12, 2026Melih Özcan, Umut Orguner, Ozgur S. OguzNon-Prehensile Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Dept. of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkiye. · Dept. of Computer Engineering, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkiye.

  16. ComFree-Sim: A GPU-Parallelized Analytical Contact Physics Engine for Scalable Contact-Rich Robotics Simulation and Control

    Mar 12, 2026Chetan Borse, Zhixian Xie, Wei-Cheng Huang +1Robotics SimulationPhysics-Based Simulation

    Intelligent Robotics and Interactive Systems (IRIS) Lab, Arizona State University · Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  17. CRAFT: A Tendon-Driven Hand with Hybrid Hard-Soft Compliance

    Mar 12, 2026Leo Lin, Shivansh Patel, Jay Moon +2Robotic Hand DesignRobotic Grasping

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · UC Irvine

  18. Learning Adaptive Force Control for Contact-Rich Sample Scraping with Heterogeneous Materials

    Mar 11, 2026Cenk Cetin, Shreyas Pouli, Gabriella PizzutoContact-Rich Robotic ManipulationForce-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

    School of Computer Science & Informatics, University of Liverpool, UK. · Department of Chemistry, University of Liverpool, UK.

  19. ContactExplorer: Contact Coverage-Guided Exploration for General-Purpose Dexterous Manipulation

    Mar 11, 2026Zixuan Liu, Ruoyi Qiao, Chenrui Tie +5Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRL Exploration

    School of Computing, National University of Singapore · RoboScience

  20. FG-CLTP: Fine-Grained Contrastive Language Tactile Pretraining for Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 11, 2026Wenxuan Ma, Chaofan Zhang, Yinghao Cai +3Tactile Sensing for Robotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence

  21. Adaptive Manipulation Potential and Haptic Estimation for Tool-Mediated Interaction

    Mar 11, 2026Lin Yang, Anirvan Dutta, Yuan Ji +5Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobotic Tool Use

    authors are with the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. · authors are with the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, SW7 2AZ London, U.K

  22. SELF-VLA: A Skill Enhanced Agentic Vision-Language-Action Framework for Contact-Rich Disassembly

    Mar 10, 2026Chang Liu, Sibo Tian, Xiao Liang +1Vision-Language-Action ModelsContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA. · Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.

  23. ReTac-ACT: A State-Gated Vision-Tactile Fusion Transformer for Precision Assembly

    Mar 10, 2026Minchi Ruan, LiangQing Zhou, Hongtong Li +4Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobotic Assembly

    Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China · SunHDex Intelligent Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Beijing, China · University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

  24. CONTACT: CONtact-aware TACTile Learning for Robotic Disassembly

    Mar 9, 2026Yosuke Saka, Jyun-Chi Hu, Adeesh Desai +6Robotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    the Department of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA · the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA

  25. PhaForce: Phase-Scheduled Visual-Force Policy Learning with Slow Planning and Fast Correction for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Mar 9, 2026Mingxin Wang, Zhirun Yue, Renhao Lu +7Robotic ControlContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

  26. Towards Human-Like Manipulation through RL-Augmented Teleoperation and Mixture-of-Dexterous-Experts VLA

    Mar 9, 2026Tutian Tang, Xingyu Ji, Wanli Xing +7In-Hand ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Shanghai AI Lab · Sharpa +3

  27. Few-Shot Neural Differentiable Simulator: Real-to-Sim Rigid-Contact Modeling

    Mar 6, 2026Zhenhao Huang, Siyuan Luo, Bingyang Zhou +3Differentiable PhysicsRobot Dynamics Learning

    National University of Singapore, Singapore · Prana Lab, San Francisco, USA

  28. Contact-Grounded Policy: Dexterous Visuotactile Policy with Generative Contact Grounding

    Mar 5, 2026Zhengtong Xu, Yeping Wang, Ben Abbatematteo +4Robotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Purdue University · University of Wisconsin–Madison · Meta Reality Labs Research

  29. Residual RL-MPC for Robust Microrobotic Cell Pushing Under Time-Varying Flow

    Mar 5, 2026Yanda Yang, Sambeeta DasRobot Trajectory TrackingContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA

  30. Force-Aware Residual DAgger via Trajectory Editing for Precision Insertion with Impedance Control

    Mar 4, 2026Yiou Huang, Ning Ma, Weichu Zhao +4Interactive Imitation LearningContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    All authors are with Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China.