Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

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Force-controlled robotic manipulation studies how robots use contact forces to perform tasks that require more than accurate positioning, such as inserting parts, handling fragile objects, wiping surfaces, or turning valves. Common approaches include impedance and admittance control, hybrid force-position control, and tactile or force-feedback policies; newer systems pair slower vision or language-guided planning with fast reflexes that correct contact in real time. Researchers also use demonstrations, reinforcement learning, and simulation to learn force-aware behavior, sometimes estimating forces from vision, motor currents, or other low-cost signals instead of dedicated sensors. A central challenge is making these methods reliable across objects, tasks, and real-world conditions while balancing force accuracy, safety, sensing cost, and the speed of learned policies.

Latest papers

122 papers31 papers in the last four weeks, down 14% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

May 21, 2026

CoRMA: Contrastive RMA for Contact-Rich Meta-Adaptation

We present CoRMA(Contrastive Robotic Motor Adaptation), a context-based meta-adaptation framework that modifies RMA for force-dominant assembly. CoRMA replaces raw simulator-parameter adaptation with a compact 6D simulator-only semantic contact context describing contact onset, lateral engagement, guided transition, contact direction, and jamming. A deployable causal Transformer adapter infers this context online from force, proprioceptive, and action histories using semantic regression and a force-regime contrastive objective. At deployment, oracle context is removed and replaced by the inferred context, enabling within-episode adaptation without demonstrations, privileged inputs, or gradient updates. We evaluate CoRMA on PegInsert, GearMesh, and NutThread in Isaac Lab / Isaac Sim 5.0 and on a real Marvin arm. Compared with FORGE baselines that achieve high simulation success but degrade substantially on hardware, CoRMA retains higher verified real success under controlled target-pose noise. These results support semantic contact inference as a reusable adaptation interface within a related assembly task family, while broader unseen-task generalization and Real2Sim calibration remain future work.

Wentian Wang, Chutong Wen, Hongxu Ma +6

Synthoid AI · HKU

Robot Policy Adaptation Robot Skill Learning Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Sim-to-Real Transfer Robotic Insertion Robotic Manipulation+3

Apr 21, 2026

Learning Hybrid-Control Policies for High-Precision In-Contact Manipulation Under Uncertainty

Reinforcement learning-based control policies have been frequently demonstrated to be more effective than analytical techniques for many manipulation tasks. Commonly, these methods learn neural control policies that predict end-effector pose changes directly from observed state information. For tasks like inserting delicate connectors which induce force constraints, pose-based policies have limited explicit control over force and rely on carefully tuned low-level controllers to avoid executing damaging actions. In this work, we present hybrid position-force control policies that learn to dynamically select when to use force or position control in each control dimension. To improve learning efficiency of these policies, we introduce Mode-Aware Training for Contact Handling (MATCH) which adjusts policy action probabilities to explicitly mirror the mode selection behavior in hybrid control. We validate MATCH's learned policy effectiveness using fragile peg-in-hole tasks under extreme localization uncertainty. We find MATCH substantially outperforms pose-control policies -- solving these tasks with up to 10% higher success rates and 5x fewer peg breaks than pose-only policies under common types of state estimation error. MATCH also demonstrates data efficiency equal to pose-control policies, despite learning in a larger and more complex action space. In over 1600 sim-to-real experiments, we find MATCH succeeds twice as often as pose policies in high noise settings (33% vs.~68%) and applies ~30% less force on average compared to variable impedance policies on a Franka FR3 in laboratory conditions.

Hunter L. Brown, Geoffrey Hollinger, Stefan Lee

Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR

Robotic Control Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Robotic RL Robotic Insertion Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Robust RL

Apr 12, 2026

OmniUMI: Towards Physically Grounded Robot Learning via Human-Aligned Multimodal Interaction

UMI-style interfaces enable scalable robot learning, but existing systems remain largely visuomotor, relying primarily on RGB observations and trajectory while providing only limited access to physical interaction signals. This becomes a fundamental limitation in contact-rich manipulation, where success depends on contact dynamics such as tactile interaction, internal grasping force, and external interaction wrench that are difficult to infer from vision alone. We present OmniUMI, a unified framework for physically grounded robot learning via human-aligned multimodal interaction. OmniUMI synchronously captures RGB, depth, trajectory, tactile sensing, internal grasping force, and external interaction wrench within a compact handheld system, while maintaining collection--deployment consistency through a shared embodiment design. To support human-aligned demonstration, OmniUMI enables natural perception and modulation of internal grasping force, external interaction wrench, and tactile interaction through bilateral gripper feedback and the handheld embodiment. Built on this interface, we extend diffusion policy with visual, tactile, and force-related observations, and deploy the learned policy through impedance-based execution for unified regulation of motion and contact behavior. Experiments demonstrate reliable sensing and strong downstream performance on force-sensitive pick-and-place, interactive surface erasing, and tactile-informed selective release. Overall, OmniUMI combines physically grounded multimodal data acquisition with human-aligned interaction, providing a scalable foundation for learning contact-rich manipulation.

Shaqi Luo, Yuanyuan Li, Youhao Hu +7

Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence · MAIS & NLPR, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences +3

Robot Learning Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Robotic Data Collection Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Tactile Sensing for Robotic Manipulation Human-Robot Interaction

Apr 7, 2026

Delta6: A Low-Cost, 6-DOF Force-Sensing Flexible End-Effector

This paper presents Delta6, a low-cost, six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) force/torque end-effector that combines antagonistic springs with magnetic encoders to deliver accurate wrench sensing while remaining as simple to assemble as flat-pack furniture. A fully 3D-printed prototype, assembled entirely from off-the-shelf parts, withstands peak forces above +/-14.4 N and torques of +/-0.33 N.m per axis; these limits can be further extended by leveraging the proposed parametric analytical model. Without calibration, Delta6 attains a 99th-percentile error of 7% full scale (FS). With lightweight sequence models, the error is reduced to 3.8% FS by the best-performing network. Benchmarks on multiple computing platforms confirm that the device's bandwidth is adjustable, enabling balanced trade-offs among update rate, accuracy, and cost, while durability, thermal drift, and zero-calibration tests confirm its robustness. With Delta6 mounted on a robot arm governed by a force-impedance controller, the system successfully performs two contact-rich tasks: buffing curved surfaces and tight assemblies. Experiments validate the design, showing that Delta6 is a robust, low-cost alternative to existing 6-DOF force sensing solutions. Open-source site: https://wings-robotics.github.io/delta6 .

Yue Feng, Weicheng Huang, Chen Qiu +2

Robotics Research Center (RRC), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798. · WinGs Robotics LLC, NY, 10314 USA. · Maider Medical Industry Equipment Company, Ltd., Taizhou 317607, China. +1

Robotics Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

Apr 7, 2026

Learning-Guided Force-Feedback Model Predictive Control with Obstacle Avoidance for Robotic Deburring

Model Predictive Control (MPC) is widely used for torque-controlled robots, but classical formulations often neglect real-time force feedback and struggle with contact-rich industrial tasks under collision constraints. Deburring in particular requires precise tool insertion, stable force regulation, and collision-free circular motions in challenging configurations, which exceeds the capability of standard MPC pipelines. We propose a framework that integrates force-feedback MPC with diffusion-based motion priors to address these challenges. The diffusion model serves as a memory of motion strategies, providing robust initialization and adaptation across multiple task instances, while MPC ensures safe execution with explicit force tracking, torque feasibility, and collision avoidance. We validate our approach on a torque-controlled manipulator performing industrial deburring tasks. Experiments demonstrate reliable tool insertion, accurate normal force tracking, and circular deburring motions even in hard-to-reach configurations and under obstacle constraints. To our knowledge, this is the first integration of diffusion motion priors with force-feedback MPC for collision-aware, contact-rich industrial tasks.

Krzysztof Wojciechowski, Ege Gursoy, Arthur Haffemayer +4

LAAS-CNRS, Universite de Toulouse, CNRS, Toulouse, France · Inria, AUCTUS team, Talence, France · Image and Pervasive Access Laboratory (IPAL), CNRS-UMI, 2955, Singapore +1

Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Model Predictive Control Robotic Manipulation Industrial Robotics

Apr 7, 2026

GraspSense: Physically Grounded Grasp and Grip Planning for a Dexterous Robotic Hand via Language-Guided Perception and Force Maps

Dexterous robotic manipulation requires more than geometrically valid grasps: it demands physically grounded contact strategies that account for the spatially non-uniform mechanical properties of the object. However, existing grasp planners typically treat the surface as structurally homogeneous, even though contact in a weak region can damage the object despite a geometrically perfect grasp. We present a pipeline for grasp selection and force regulation in a five-fingered robotic hand, based on a map of locally admissible contact loads. From an operator command, the system identifies the target object, reconstructs its 3D geometry using SAM3D, and imports the model into Isaac Sim. A physics-informed geometric analysis then computes a force map that encodes the maximum lateral contact force admissible at each surface location without deformation. Grasp candidates are filtered by geometric validity and task-goal consistency. When multiple candidates are comparable under classical metrics, they are re-ranked using a force-map-aware criterion that favors grasps with contacts in mechanically admissible regions. An impedance controller scales the stiffness of each finger according to the locally admissible force at the contact point, enabling safe and reliable grasp execution. Validation on paper, plastic, and glass cups shows that the proposed approach consistently selects structurally stronger contact regions and keeps grip forces within safe bounds. In this way, the work reframes dexterous manipulation from a purely geometric problem into a physically grounded joint planning problem of grasp selection and grip execution for future humanoid systems.

Elizaveta Semenyakina, Ivan Snegirev, Mariya Lezina +3

Intelligent Space Robotics Laboratory, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology

Robotic Grasping Dexterous Manipulation Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

Mar 31, 2026

Long-Reach Robotic Cleaning for Lunar Solar Arrays

Commercial lunar activity is accelerating the need for reliable surface infrastructure and routine operations to keep it functioning. Maintenance tasks such as inspection, cleaning, dust mitigation, and minor repair are essential to preserve performance and extend system life. A specific application is the cleaning of lunar solar arrays. Solar arrays are expected to provide substantial fraction of lunar surface power and operate for months to years, supplying continuous energy to landers, habitats, and surface assets, making sustained output mission-critical. However, over time lunar dust accumulates on these large solar arrays, which can rapidly degrade panel output and reduce mission lifetime. We propose a small mobile robot equipped with a long-reach, lightweight deployable boom and interchangeable cleaning tool to perform gentle cleaning over meter-scale workspaces with minimal human involvement. Building on prior vision-guided long-reach manipulation, we add a compliant wrist with distal force sensing and a velocity-based admittance controller to regulate stable contact during surface cleaning. In preliminary benchtop experiments on a planar surface, the system maintained approximately 2 N normal force while executing a simple cleaning motion over boom lengths from 0.3 m to 1.0 m, with RMS force error of approximately 0.2 N after initial contact. These early results suggest that deployable long-reach manipulators are a promising architecture for robotic maintenance of lunar infrastructure such as solar arrays, radiators, and optical surfaces.

Stanley Wang, Velin Kojouharov, Long Yin Chung +2

All authors are with the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.

Robotics Space Robotics Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

Mar 24, 2026

DecompGrind: A Decomposition Framework for Robotic Grinding via Cutting-Surface Planning and Contact-Force Adaptation

Robotic grinding is widely used for shaping workpieces in manufacturing, but it remains difficult to automate this process efficiently. In particular, efficiently grinding workpieces of different shapes and material hardness is challenging because removal resistance varies with local contact conditions. Moreover, it is difficult to achieve accurate estimation of removal resistance and analytical modeling of shape transition, and learning-based approaches often require large amounts of training data to cover diverse processing conditions. To address these challenges, we decompose robotic grinding into two components: removal-shape planning and contact-force adaptation. Based on this formulation, we propose DecompGrind, a framework that combines Global Cutting-Surface Planning (GCSP) and Local Contact-Force Adaptation (LCFA). GCSP determines removal shapes through geometric analysis of the current and target shapes without learning, while LCFA learns a contact-force adaptation policy using bilateral control-based imitation learning during the grinding of each removal shape. This decomposition restricts learning to local contact-force adaptation, allowing the policy to be learned from a small number of demonstrations, while handling global shape transition geometrically. Experiments using a robotic grinding system and 3D-printed workpieces demonstrate efficient robotic grinding of workpieces having different shapes and material hardness while maintaining safe levels of contact force.

Shunsuke Araki, Takumi Hachimine, Yuki Saito +3

Division of Information Science, Graduate School of Science and Technology, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Nara, Japan. · Haptics Research Center, Keio University, Kanagawa, Japan. · Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. +1

Robotic Tool Use Robotic Manipulation Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

Mar 17, 2026

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

Robotic manipulation tasks that require repeated tool motion along curved surfaces frequently arise in surface finishing, inspection, and guided interaction. In practice, nominal motion primitives are often designed independently of the deployment surface and later reused across varying geometries. Directly tiling such primitives onto nonplanar surfaces introduces geometric inconsistencies, leading to interpenetration, orientation discontinuities, and cumulative drift over repeated cycles. We present a two-stage framework that separates geometric embedding from execution-level regulation. An offline surface-constrained warping operator embeds a nominal periodic primitive onto curved surfaces through asymmetric diffeomorphic deformation of dual-track waypoints and axis-consistent orientation completion, producing a surface-adapted reference trajectory. An online contact-aware projection operator then enforces bounded deviation relative to this reference using FSR-driven disturbance adaptation and a conic orientation safety constraint. Experiments across multiple analytic surface families and real-robot validation on a sinusoidal surface demonstrate improved geometric continuity, reduced large orientation jumps, and robust contact maintenance compared with direct tiling. These results show that decoupling offline geometric remapping from lightweight online projection enables stable and repeatable surface-embedded trajectory execution under sensor-lite feedbacks.

Farong Wang, Sai Swaminathan, Fei Liu

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.

Robot Motion Generation Robot Trajectory Tracking Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

Mar 16, 2026

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

Embodied intelligence for contact-rich manipulation has predominantly relied on position control, while explicit awareness and regulation of interaction forces remain under-explored, limiting stability, precision, and robustness in real-world tasks. We propose ForceVLA2, an end-to-end vision-language-action framework that equips robots with hybrid force-position control and explicit force awareness. ForceVLA2 introduces force-based prompts into the VLM expert to construct force-aware task concepts across stages, and employs a Cross-Scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) in the action expert to adaptively fuse these concepts with real-time interaction forces for closed-loop hybrid force-position regulation. To support learning and evaluation, we construct ForceVLA2-Dataset, containing 1,000 trajectories over 5 contact-rich tasks, including wiping, pressing, and assembling, with multi-view images, task prompts, proprioceptive state, and force signals. Extensive experiments show that ForceVLA2 substantially improves success rates and reliability in contact-rich manipulation, outperforming pi0 and pi0.5 by 48.0% and 35.0%, respectively, across the 5 tasks, and mitigating common failure modes such as arm overload and unstable contact, thereby actively advancing force-aware interactive physical intelligence in VLAs. The project page is available at https://sites.google.com/view/force-vla2/home.

Yang Li, Zhaxizhuoma, Hongru Jiang +11

Tongji University · Shanghai AI Laboratory · Lumos Robotics +6

Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation VLMs for Robotics

Mar 16, 2026

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

Robotic contact-rich and fine-grained manipulation remains a significant challenge due to complex interaction dynamics and the competing requirements of multi-timescale control. While current visual imitation learning methods excel at long-horizon planning, they often fail to perceive critical interaction cues like friction variations or incipient slip, and struggle to balance global task coherence with local reactive feedback. To address these challenges, we propose M2-ResiPolicy, a novel Master-Micro residual control architecture that synergizes high-level action guidance with low-level correction. The framework consists of a Master-Guidance Policy (MGP) operating at 10 Hz, which generates temporally consistent action chunks via a diffusion-based backbone and employs a tactile-intensity-driven adaptive fusion mechanism to dynamically modulate perceptual weights between vision and touch. Simultaneously, a high-frequency (60 Hz) Micro-Residual Corrector (MRC) utilizes a lightweight GRU to provide real-time action compensation based on TCP wrench feedback. This policy is further integrated with a force-mixed PBIC execution layer, effectively regulating contact forces to ensure interaction safety. Experiments across several demanding tasks including fragile object grasping and precision insertion, demonstrate that M2-ResiPolicy significantly outperforms standard Diffusion Policy (DP) and state-of-the-art Reactive Diffusion Policy (RDP), achieving a 93% damage-free success rate in chip grasping and superior force regulation stability.

Xingting Li, Yifan Xie, Han Liu +4

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.

Robotic Manipulation Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Residual Policy Learning Diffusion Policy Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Tactile Sensing for Robotic Manipulation

Mar 12, 2026

A Generalized Theory of Load Distribution in Redundantly-actuated Robotic Systems

This paper presents a generalized theory which describes how applied loads are distributed within rigid bodies handled by redundantly-actuated robotic systems composed of multiple independent closed-loop kinematic chains. The theory fully characterizes the feasible set of manipulating wrench distributions for a given resultant wrench applied to the rigid body and has important implications for the force-control of multifingered grippers, legged robots, cooperating robots, and other overconstrained mechanisms. We also derive explicit solutions to the wrench synthesis and wrench analysis problems. These solutions are computationally efficient and scale linearly with the number of applied wrenches, requiring neither numerical methods nor the inversion of large matrices. Finally, we identify significant shortcomings in current state-of-the-art approaches and propose corrections. These are supported by illustrative examples and a simulation that demonstrate the advantages of the improved methods.

Joshua Flight, Clément Gosselin

Département de génie mécanique et de génie industriel, Université Laval, Canada.

Robotic Manipulation Robotic Control Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

Mar 11, 2026

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

The increasing demand for accelerated scientific discovery, driven by global challenges, highlights the need for advanced AI-driven robotics. Deploying robotic chemists in human-centric labs is key for the next horizon of autonomous discovery, as complex tasks still demand the dexterity of human scientists. Robotic manipulation in this context is uniquely challenged by handling diverse chemicals (granular, powdery, or viscous liquids), under varying lab conditions. For example, humans use spatulas for scraping materials from vial walls. Automating this process is challenging because it goes beyond simple robotic insertion tasks and traditional lab automation, requiring the execution of fine-granular movements within a constrained environment (the sample vial). Our work proposes an adaptive control framework to address this, relying on a low-level Cartesian impedance controller for stable and compliant physical interaction and a high-level reinforcement learning agent that learns to dynamically adjust interaction forces at the end-effector. The agent is guided by perception feedback, which provides the material's location. We first created a task-representative simulation environment with a Franka Research 3 robot, a scraping tool, and a sample vial containing heterogeneous materials. To facilitate the learning of an adaptive policy and model diverse characteristics, the sample is modelled as a collection of spheres, where each sphere is assigned a unique dislodgement force threshold, which is procedurally generated using Perlin noise. We train an agent to autonomously learn and adapt the optimal contact wrench for a sample scraping task in simulation and then successfully transfer this policy to a real robotic setup. Our method was evaluated across five different material setups, outperforming a fixed-wrench baseline by an average of 10.9%.

Cenk Cetin, Shreyas Pouli, Gabriella Pizzuto

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

Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Laboratory Automation Robotic RL

Mar 9, 2026

Characterization, Analytical Planning, and Hybrid Force Control for the Inspire RH56DFX Hand

Commercially accessible dexterous robot hands are increasingly prevalent, but many remain difficult to use as scientific instruments. For example, the Inspire RH56DFX hand exposes only uncalibrated proprioceptive information and shows unreliable contact behavior at high speed (up to 1618% force limit overshoot). Furthermore, its underactuated, coupled finger linkages make antipodal grasps non-trivial. We contribute three improvements to the Inspire RH56DFX to transform it from a black-box device to a research tool: (1) hardware characterization (force calibration, latency, and overshoot), (2) a sim2real validated MuJoCo model for analytical width-to-grasp planning, and (3) a hybrid, closed-loop speed-force grasp controller. We validate these components on peg-in-hole insertion, achieving 65% success and outperforming a wrist-force-only baseline of 10% and on 300 grasps across 15 physically diverse objects, achieving 87% success and outperforming plan-free grasps and learned grasps. Our approach is modular, designed for compatibility with external object detectors and vision-language models for width & force estimation and high-level planning, and provides an interpretable and immediately deployable interface for dexterous manipulation with the Inspire RH56DFX hand, open-sourced at this website https://correlllab.github.io/rh56dfx.html.

Xuan Tan, William Xie, Nikolaus Correll

Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder

Robotic Grasping Dexterous Manipulation Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Robot Task Planning

Mar 9, 2026

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

Contact-rich manipulation requires not only vision-dominant task semantics but also closed-loop reactions to force/torque (F/T) transients. Yet, generative visuomotor policies are typically constrained to low-frequency updates due to inference latency and action chunking, underutilizing F/T for control-rate feedback. Furthermore, existing force-aware methods often inject force continuously and indiscriminately, lacking an explicit mechanism to schedule when / how much / where to apply force across different task phases. We propose PhaForce, a phase-scheduled visual--force policy that coordinates low-rate chunk-level planning and high-rate residual correction via a unified contact/phase schedule. PhaForce comprises (i) a contact-aware phase predictor (CAP) that estimates contact probability and phase belief, (ii) a Slow diffusion planner that performs dual-gated visual--force fusion with orthogonal residual injection to preserve vision semantics while conditioning on force, and (iii) a Fast corrector that applies control-rate phase-routed residuals in interpretable corrective subspaces for within-chunk micro-adjustments. Across multiple real-robot contact-rich tasks, PhaForce achieves an average success rate of 86% (+40 pp over baselines), while also substantially improving contact quality by regulating interaction forces and exhibiting robust adaptability to OOD geometric shifts.

Mingxin Wang, Zhirun Yue, Renhao Lu +7

Robotic Control Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Visuomotor Policy Learning Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

Mar 9, 2026

Multifingered force-aware control for humanoid robots

In this paper, we address force-aware control and force distribution in robotic platforms with multi-fingered hands. Given a target goal and force estimates from tactile sensors, we design a controller that adapts the motion of the torso, arm, wrist, and fingers, redistributing forces to maintain stable contact with objects of varying mass distribution or unstable contacts. To estimate forces, we collect a dataset of tactile signals and ground-truth force measurements using five Xela magnetic sensors interacting with indenters, and train force estimators. We then introduce a model-based control scheme that minimizes the distance between the Center of Pressure (CoP) and the centroid of the fingertips contact polygon. Since our method relies on estimated forces rather than raw tactile signals, it has the potential to be applied to any sensor capable of force estimation. We validate our framework on a balancing task with five objects, achieving a

82.7\%

success rate, and further evaluate it in multi-object scenarios, achieving

80\%

accuracy. Code and data can be found here https://github.com/hsp-iit/multifingered-force-aware-control.

Pasquale Marra, Gabriele M. Caddeo, Ugo Pattacini +1

Humanoid Sensing and Perception, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy. · DIBRIS, Universit`a di Genova, Via All’Opera Pia, 13, Genoa, Italy. · MESH Facility, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy

Humanoid Robot Control Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Robotic Manipulation Contact Force Estimation Tactile Sensing for Robotic Manipulation

Mar 7, 2026

TacDexGrasp: Compliant and Robust Dexterous Grasping with Tactile Feedback

Multi-fingered hands offer great potential for compliant and robust grasping of unknown objects, yet their high-dimensional force control presents a significant challenge. This work addresses two key problems: (1) distributing forces across multiple contacts to counteract an object's weight, and (2) preventing rotational slip caused by gravitational torque when a grasp is distant from the object's center of mass. We address these challenges via tactile feedback and a Second-Order Cone Programming (SOCP)-based controller, without explicit torque modeling or slip detection. Our key insights are (1) rotational slip inevitably induces translational slip at some contact points for a multi-fingered grasp, and (2) the ratio of tangential to normal force at each contact is an effective early stability indicator. By actively constraining this ratio for each finger below the estimated friction coefficient, our controller maintains grasp stability against both translational and rotational slip. Real-world experiments on 12 diverse objects demonstrate the robustness and compliance of our approach.

Yubin Ke, Jiayi Chen, Hang Lv +2

Peking University · Galbot · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence

Second-Order Cone Programming Robotic Grasping Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Dexterous Manipulation

Mar 5, 2026

TEGA: A Tactile-Enhanced Grasping Assistant for Assistive Robotics via Sensor Fusion and Closed-Loop Haptic Feedback

Recent advances in teleoperation have enabled sophisticated manipulation of dexterous robotic hands, with most systems concentrating on guiding finger positions to achieve desired grasp configurations. However, while accurate finger positioning is essential, it often overlooks the equally critical task of grasp force modulation, vital for handling objects of diverse hardness, texture, and shape. This limitation poses a significant challenge for users, especially individuals with upper limb disabilities who lack natural tactile feedback and rely on indirect cues to infer appropriate force levels. To address this gap, We present the tactile enhanced grasping assistant (TEGA), a closed loop assistive teleoperation framework that fuses EMG based intent2force inference with visuotactile sensing mapped into real time vibrotactile feedback via a wearable haptic vest, enabling intuitive, proportional force adjustment during manipulation. A wearable haptic vest delivers real time tactile feedback, allowing users to dynamically refine grasp force during manipulation. User studies confirm that the system substantially improves grasp stability and task success, underscoring its potential for assistive robotic applications.

Hengxu You, Tianyu Zhou, Fang Xu +2

All authors are with the Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA. · All authors are with Nvidia

Haptic Feedback for Robot Teleoperation Robotic Grasping Assistive Robotics Robot Teleoperation Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Robotic Tactile Sensing

Mar 4, 2026

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

Imitation learning (IL) has shown strong potential for contact-rich precision insertion tasks. However, its practical deployment is often hindered by covariate shift and the need for continuous expert monitoring to recover from failures during execution. In this paper, we propose Trajectory Editing Residual Dataset Aggregation (TER-DAgger), a scalable and force-aware human-in-the-loop imitation learning framework that mitigates covariate shift by learning residual policies through optimization-based trajectory editing. This approach smoothly fuses policy rollouts with human corrective trajectories, providing consistent and stable supervision. Second, we introduce a force-aware failure anticipation mechanism that triggers human intervention only when discrepancies arise between predicted and measured end-effector forces, significantly reducing the requirement for continuous expert monitoring. Third, all learned policies are executed within a Cartesian impedance control framework, ensuring compliant and safe behavior during contact-rich interactions. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world precision insertion tasks show that TER-DAgger improves the average success rate by over 37% compared to behavior cloning, human-guided correction, retraining, and fine-tuning baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness in mitigating covariate shift and enabling scalable deployment in contact-rich manipulation.

Yiou Huang, Ning Ma, Weichu Zhao +4

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

Interactive Imitation Learning Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Robotic Insertion Residual Policy Learning Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

Mar 4, 2026

Bi-HIL: Bilateral Control-Based Multimodal Hierarchical Imitation Learning via Subtask-Level Progress Rate and Keyframe Memory for Long-Horizon Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

Long-horizon contact-rich robotic manipulation remains challenging due to partial observability and unstable subtask transitions under contact uncertainty. While hierarchical architectures improve temporal reasoning and bilateral imitation learning enables force-aware control, existing approaches often rely on flat policies that struggle with long-horizon coordination. We propose Bi-HIL, a bilateral control-based multimodal hierarchical imitation learning framework for long-horizon manipulation. Bi-HIL stabilizes hierarchical coordination by integrating keyframe memory with subtask-level progress rate that models phase progression within the active subtask and conditions both high- and low-level policies. We evaluate Bi-HIL on unimanual and bimanual real-robot tasks, demonstrating consistent improvements over flat and ablated variants. The results highlight the importance of explicitly modeling subtask progression together with force-aware control for robust long-horizon manipulation. For additional material, please check: https://mertcookimg.github.io/bi-hil

Thanpimon Buamanee, Masato Kobayashi, Yuki Uranishi

The University of Osaka · Kobe University

Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Robot Imitation Learning Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Imitation Learning Hierarchical Robot Control Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

Mar 3, 2026

How to Peel with a Knife: Aligning Fine-Grained Manipulation with Human Preference

Many essential manipulation tasks - such as food preparation, surgery, and craftsmanship - remain intractable for autonomous robots. These tasks are characterized not only by contact-rich, force-sensitive dynamics, but also by their "implicit" success criteria: unlike pick-and-place, task quality in these domains is continuous and subjective (e.g. how well a potato is peeled), making quantitative evaluation and reward engineering difficult. We present a learning framework for such tasks, using peeling with a knife as a representative example. Our approach follows a two-stage pipeline: first, we learn a robust initial policy via force-aware data collection and imitation learning, enabling generalization across object variations; second, we refine the policy through preference-based finetuning using a learned reward model that combines quantitative task metrics with qualitative human feedback, aligning policy behavior with human notions of task quality. Using only 50-200 peeling trajectories, our system achieves over 90% average success rates on challenging produce including cucumbers, apples, and potatoes, with performance improving by up to 40% through preference-based finetuning. Remarkably, policies trained on a single produce category exhibit strong zero-shot generalization to unseen in-category instances and to out-of-distribution produce from different categories while maintaining over 90% success rates.

Toru Lin, Shuying Deng, Zhao-Heng Yin +2

University of California, Berkeley · Tsinghua University

Robotic Manipulation Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Generalization in Robotic Manipulation Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Robot Imitation Learning

Mar 2, 2026

Safe Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation via Combined Model and Learning-based Control

Simultaneous locomotion and manipulation enables robots to interact with their environment beyond the constraints of a fixed base. However, coordinating legged locomotion with arm manipulation, while considering safety and compliance during contact interaction remains challenging. To this end, we propose a whole-body controller that combines a model-based admittance control for the manipulator arm with a Reinforcement Learning (RL) policy for legged locomotion. The admittance controller maps external wrenches--such as those applied by a human during physical interaction--into desired end-effector velocities, allowing for compliant behavior. The velocities are tracked jointly by the arm and leg controllers, enabling a unified 6-DoF force response. The model-based design permits accurate force control and safety guarantees via a Reference Governor (RG), while robustness is further improved by a Kalman filter enhanced with neural networks for reliable base velocity estimation. We validate our approach in both simulation and hardware using the Unitree Go2 quadruped robot with a 6-DoF arm and wrist-mounted 6-DoF Force/Torque sensor. Results demonstrate accurate tracking of interaction-driven velocities, compliant behavior, and safe, reliable performance in dynamic settings.

Alexander Schperberg, Yeping Wang, Stefano Di Cairano

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA. · Yeping Wang was with Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) during part of the work of this paper, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA.

Robotic Loco-Manipulation Robotic Control Whole-Body Robotic Manipulation Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

Mar 1, 2026

D-REX: Differentiable Real-to-Sim-to-Real Engine for Learning Dexterous Grasping

Simulation provides a cost-effective and flexible platform for data generation and policy learning to develop robotic systems. However, bridging the gap between simulation and real-world dynamics remains a significant challenge, especially in physical parameter identification. In this work, we introduce a real-to-sim-to-real engine that leverages the Gaussian Splat representations to build a differentiable engine, enabling object mass identification from real-world visual observations and robot control signals, while enabling grasping policy learning simultaneously. Through optimizing the mass of the manipulated object, our method automatically builds high-fidelity and physically plausible digital twins. Additionally, we propose a novel approach to train force-aware grasping policies from limited data by transferring feasible human demonstrations into simulated robot demonstrations. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our engine achieves accurate and robust performance in mass identification across various object geometries and mass values. Those optimized mass values facilitate force-aware policy learning, achieving superior and high performance in object grasping, effectively reducing the sim-to-real gap.

Haozhe Lou, Mingtong Zhang, Haoran Geng +9

Physical Superintelligence (PSI) Lab, University of Southern California · Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California · Department of EECS, University of California, Berkeley

Robotic Grasping Robotics Simulation Sim-to-Real Transfer Robot Dynamics Identification Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

Feb 27, 2026

Hybrid Offline-Online Reinforcement Learning for Sensorless, High-Precision Force Regulation in Surgical Robotic Grasping

Precise grasp force regulation in tendon-driven surgical instruments is fundamentally limited by nonlinear coupling between motor dynamics, transmission compliance, friction, and distal mechanics. Existing solutions typically rely on distal force sensing or analytical compensation, increasing hardware complexity or degrading performance under dynamic motion. We present a sensorless control framework that combines physics-consistent modeling and hybrid reinforcement learning to achieve high-precision distal force regulation in a proximally actuated surgical end-effector. We develop a first-principles digital twin of the da Vinci Xi grasping mechanism that captures coupled electrical, transmission, and jaw dynamics within a unified differential-algebraic formulation. To safely learn control policies in this stiff and highly nonlinear system, we introduce a three-stage pipeline:(i)a receding-horizon CMA-ES oracle that generates dynamically feasible expert trajectories,(ii)fully offline policy learning via Implicit Q-Learning to ensure stable initialization without unsafe exploration, and (iii)online refinement using TD3 for adaptation to on-policy dynamics. The resulting policy directly maps proximal measurements to motor voltages and requires no distal sensing. In simulation, the controller maintains grasp force within 1% of the desired reference during multi-harmonic jaw motion. Hardware experiments demonstrate average force errors below 4% across diverse trajectories, validating sim-to-real transfer. The learned policy contains approximately 71k param and executes at kH rates, enabling real-time deployment. These results demonstrate that high-fidelity modeling combined with structured offline-online RL can recover precise distal force behavior without additional sensing, offering a scalable and mechanically compatible solution for surgical robotic manipulation.

Edoardo Fazzari, Omar Mohamed, Khalfan Hableel +2

Dept. of Robotics, Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI, Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Surgical Robotics Offline-To-Online RL

Feb 27, 2026

FAVLA: A Force-Adaptive Fast-Slow VLA model for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

Force/torque feedback can substantially improve Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models on contact-rich manipulation, but most existing approaches fuse all modalities at a single operating frequency. This design ignores the mismatched sampling rates of real robot sensors, forcing downsampling of the high-frequency contact cues needed for reactive correction. Combined with common VLM-action-expert (AE) pipelines that execute action chunks largely open loop between expensive VLM updates, unified-frequency fusion often yields delayed responses to impacts, stick-slip, and force spikes. We propose FAVLA, a force-adaptive fast-slow VLA that decouples slow perception planning from fast contact-aware control. FAVLA runs a slow VLM at a fixed low frequency to encode modalities to produce latent representations and to predict near-future force variation. A fast AE then executes at a variable high frequency, conditioning on the latest force sequence data to generate reactive actions. We further introduce a force adapter that injects high-frequency force features into multiple AE layers, and adaptively schedules the AE's execution frequency based on the VLM's predicted force variation. Extensive experiments on contact-rich tasks demonstrate that FAVLA significantly outperforms baselines, achieving superior reactivity and success rates, especially with a smaller contact force during manipulation.

Yao Li, Peiyuan Tang, Wuyang Zhang +7

University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China · Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China · Central South University, Changsha, China

Vision-Language-Action Models Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

Feb 25, 2026

Force Policy: Learning Hybrid Force-Position Control Policy under Interaction Frame for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Contact-rich manipulation demands human-like integration of perception and force feedback: vision should guide task progress, while high-frequency interaction control must stabilize contact under uncertainty. Existing learning-based policies often entangle these roles in a monolithic network, trading off global generalization against stable local refinement, while control-centric approaches typically assume a known task structure or learn only controller parameters rather than the structure itself. In this paper, we formalize a physically grounded interaction frame, an instantaneous local basis that decouples force regulation from motion execution, and propose a method to recover it from demonstrations. Based on this, we address both issues by proposing Force Policy, a global-local vision-force policy in which a global policy guides free-space actions using vision, and upon contact, a high-frequency local policy with force feedback estimates the interaction frame and executes hybrid force-position control for stable interaction. Real-world experiments across diverse contact-rich tasks show consistent gains over strong baselines, with more robust contact establishment, more accurate force regulation, and reliable generalization to novel objects with varied geometries and physical properties, ultimately improving both contact stability and execution quality. Project page: https://force-policy.github.io/

Hongjie Fang, Shirun Tang, Mingyu Mei +9

Noematrix · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Zhejiang University +2

Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Vision-Based Robot Control

Feb 24, 2026

Acoustic Feedback for Closed-Loop Force Control in Robotic Grinding

Acoustic feedback is a critical indicator for assessing the contact condition between the tool and the workpiece when humans perform grinding tasks with rotary tools. In contrast, robotic grinding systems typically rely on force sensing, with acoustic information largely ignored. This reliance on force sensors is costly and difficult to adapt to different grinding tools, whereas audio sensors (microphones) are low-cost and can be mounted on any medium that conducts grinding sound. This paper introduces a low-cost Acoustic Feedback Robotic Grinding System (AFRG) that captures audio signals with a contact microphone, estimates grinding force from the audio in real time, and enables closed-loop force control of the grinding process. Compared with conventional force-sensing approaches, AFRG achieves a 4-fold improvement in consistency across different grinding disc conditions. AFRG relies solely on a low-cost microphone, which is approximately 200-fold cheaper than conventional force sensors, as the sensing modality, providing an easily deployable, cost-effective robotic grinding solution.

Zongyuan Zhang, Christopher Lehnert, Will N. Browne +1

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George St, Brisbane, 4000, Queensland, Australia · Australian Cobotics Centre, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George St, Brisbane, 4000, Queensland, Australia · Centre for Robotics, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George St, Brisbane, 4000, Queensland, Australia

Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Robotic Tool Use

Feb 16, 2026

Simulation-based Learning of Electrical Cabinet Assembly Using Robot Skills

This paper presents a simulation-driven approach for automating the force-controlled assembly of electrical terminals on DIN-rails, a task traditionally hindered by high programming effort and product variability. The proposed method integrates deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with parameterizable robot skills in a physics-based simulation environment. To realistically model the snap-fit assembly process, we develop and evaluate two types of joining models: analytical models based on beam theory and rigid-body models implemented in the MuJoCo physics engine. These models enable accurate simulation of interaction forces, essential for training DRL agents. The robot skills are structured using the pitasc framework, allowing modular, reusable control strategies. Training is conducted in simulation using Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) and Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) algorithms. Domain randomization is applied to improve robustness. The trained policies are transferred to a physical UR10e robot system without additional tuning. Experimental results demonstrate high success rates (up to 100%) in both simulation and real-world settings, even under significant positional and rotational deviations. The system generalizes well to new terminal types and positions, significantly reducing manual programming effort. This work highlights the potential of combining simulation-based learning with modular robot skills for flexible, scalable automation in small-batch manufacturing. Future work will explore hybrid learning methods, automated environment parameterization, and further refinement of joining models for design integration.

Arik Laemmle, Balázs András Bálint, Philipp Tenbrock +4

formerly Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA, Stuttgart, Germany · formerly Institut für Strahlwerkzeuge IFSW, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany · Research Laboratory on Engineering and Management Intelligence, Institute for Computer Science and Control SZTAKI, Budapest, Hungary +1

Robotic Assembly Robot Skill Learning Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Robotic RL Sim-to-Real Transfer

Feb 15, 2026

TDC: Sim-to-Real Transferable Directional Compliance for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Contact-rich manipulation requires robots to regulate both motion and interaction forces, yet achieving adaptive compliance remains a fundamental challenge. Learning from real-world data is costly and risky, while simulation-based approaches struggle with the sim-to-real gap in contact dynamics; existing sim-to-real methods either require real-world adaptation or sacrifice adaptive compliance by relying on isotropic compliant controllers. Our key insight is that force regulation decomposes into a time-varying but simulation-transferable directional component and a dynamics-sensitive but manually tunable magnitude component. We instantiate this directional component as two policy outputs, a task frame and a control mode vector, predicted by a visuomotor policy adapted from a pre-trained VLA model and trained via imitation learning on automatically generated simulation demonstrations. At deployment, an admittance controller integrates these predictions with human-specified stiffness and target wrench values to realize adaptive compliance. Our approach achieves adaptive compliance using only simulation data and can benefit from large-scale VLA pre-training. Extensive real-world experiments on four contact-rich tasks, microwave opening, peg-in-hole insertion, whiteboard wiping, and door opening, demonstrate strong task success rates and robustness to external disturbances. Project page: https://yifei-y.github.io/project-pages/TDC/.

Yifei Yang, Anzhe Chen, Zhenjie Zhu +6

Zhejiang University · Zhejiang Humanoid Robot Innovation Center

Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Sim-to-Real Transfer Impedance Control Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Compliant Robot Control

Feb 10, 2026

Learning Force-Regulated Robotic Manipulation with a Low-Cost Tactile-Force-Controlled Gripper

Successfully manipulating many everyday objects, such as potato chips, requires precise force regulation. Failure to modulate force can lead to task failure or irreversible damage to the objects. Humans can precisely achieve this by adapting force from tactile feedback, even within a short period of physical contact. We aim to give robots this capability. However, commercial grippers exhibit high cost or high minimum force, making them unsuitable for studying force-controlled policy learning with everyday force-sensitive objects. We introduce TF-Gripper, a low-cost (~$150) force-controlled parallel-jaw gripper that integrates tactile sensing as feedback. It has an effective force range of 0.45-45 N and is compatible with different robot arms. Additionally, we designed a teleoperation device paired with TF-Gripper to record human-applied grasping forces. While we can train standard low-frequency policies with the collected force data, achieving reliable performance remains challenging due to the reactive and contact-dependent nature of force-regulated manipulation. To overcome this, we propose RETAF (REactive Tactile Adaptation of Force), a framework that decouples grasping force control from arm pose prediction. RETAF regulates force at high frequency using wrist images and tactile feedback, while a base policy predicts end-effector pose and gripper open/close action. Our experiments show that, compared to position control, direct force control with TF-Gripper improves grasp stability and overall task performance across six real-world tasks. We further show that tactile feedback is essential for force regulation, and that RETAF consistently outperforms baselines and can be integrated with various base policies. We hope this work opens a path for scaling the learning of force-controlled policies in robotic manipulation. Project page: https://force-gripper.github.io .

Xuhui Kang, Tongxuan Tian, Sung-Wook Lee +3

Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA. · Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.

Robot Policy Learning Robotic Grasping Robotic Manipulation Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Tactile Sensing for Robotic Manipulation