Robotic Manipulation

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Overview

Robotic manipulation studies how machines use sensing and motion to change objects and environments, from picking and assembly to tool use and handling deformable materials. Approaches combine geometric planning and force or impedance control with imitation learning, reinforcement learning, diffusion policies, and vision-language-action models; world models, memory, tactile feedback, and human-video demonstrations are also used. Methods are tested in simulation and on real robots using suites such as LIBERO, RoboTwin, ManiSkill, and RLBench, across clutter, bimanual coordination, mobile manipulation, and precision contact tasks. A central challenge is turning benchmark performance into safe, reliable long-horizon behavior across new objects, cameras, robot bodies, and real-world dynamics, while limiting data collection and inference costs.

Latest papers

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1,656 papers375 papers in the last four weeks, up 81% on the four weeks before. 2.1% of all new papers.

  1. DexPort: A Hand-Held Skill Interface for Dexterous Hand Data Collection

    Oct 23, 2026Amber Xie, Jiawei Fu, Xiaofeng Guo +3Robotic Data CollectionRobotic Manipulation

    Amazon FAR (Frontier AI & Robotics) · Stanford University · UC San Diego

  2. Robotic Optical Coherence Tomography-Guided Geometric Modeling of Soft Tissue: 3D Representations for Data-Driven Closed-Loop Shape Control

    Oct 23, 2026Chaoyu Zhang, Guangshen Ma, Mark DraelosDeformable Object ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

  3. If at First You Don't Succeed, Backtrack: Lightweight Recovery for Frozen VLAs

    Oct 23, 2026Thomas Landeg, Thierry TambeVision-Language-Action ModelsRobotic Manipulation

    Stanford University · ETH Zurich

  4. DynaSlots: Slot-Centric 3D Dynamics Pretraining for Robot Manipulation

    Oct 23, 2026Meng Li, Lijiang Chen, Qi Zhao +4Robot LearningRobot Dynamics Learning

    Department of Electronics and Information Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China. · Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China. · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China. +1

  5. RoboCode: Learning Reusable Action Primitives for Robot Manipulation

    Oct 23, 2026Xianyue Peng, Devi Amarsaikhan, Iman SoltaniRoboticsRobotic Manipulation

  6. 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.

  7. Echo: Coupled Action and Task Status Signal Denoising for Vision Language Action Models

    Oct 22, 2026Yufeng Liu, Bohao Fan, Juntu Zhao +11Vision-Language-Action ModelsRobot Failure Detection

    SJTU · Spirit AI · USTC +3

  8. PiHand: Latent Hand-Object Interaction Priors for Physics-Based Policy Learning

    Oct 22, 2026Niklas Berndt, Xianghui Xie, Enes Duran +2Hand-Object InteractionRobotic Manipulation

    University of Tübingen, Germany · Tübingen AI Center, Germany · Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarland Informatics Campus, Germany +1

  9. Demonstration-Based Robotic Feeding Using Dynamic Movement Primitives

    Oct 22, 2026Kenzhi Iskandar Wong, Kitti Thamrongaphichartkul, Sri Harsha Turlapati +10Robotic ManipulationHuman-to-Robot Motion Imitation

    Robotics Research Centre, School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. · School of Science and Technology, Singapore University of Social Sciences, Singapore. · Department of Mechano-Informatics, University of Tokyo, Japan. +1

  10. Revisiting Distribution Matching for State-to-Vision Policy Distillation in Laparoscopic Robotic Manipulation

    Oct 22, 2026Mingyu Sheng, Jianan Fan, Dongnan Liu +3Robotic ManipulationVision-Based Robot Control

    School of Computer Science, the University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia · Institude of Medical Robotics, School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China · Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States

  11. UniFlowWAM: A Unified World-Action Model with Visual Semantics and 4D Geometry

    Oct 22, 2026Jialin Tian, Zhuofan Li, Xinkai Wang +5World Models for RoboticsWorld Action Models

    Shanghai Innovation Institute · Noematrix

  12. In-Context Learning World Models for Robot Dual-Arm Manipulation of Soft Garment with Partial Observations

    Oct 22, 2026Hengyi Sim, Quentin Rouxel, Dennis Hong +2World Models for RoboticsRobotic Manipulation

    Collaborative and Versatile Robots (CLOVER) Laboratory, Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, T-Stone Robotics Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. · Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, USA · Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy +1

  13. TEAR: Task-Evidence Authority Routing for Robotic Manipulation

    Oct 22, 2026Shicheng Zhang, Hui Liu, Haoliang LiRobotic ManipulationRobot Teleoperation

    Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong

  14. Live Thread Reconstruction for Autonomous Manipulation

    Oct 22, 2026Emma Huang, Omar Hernandez, Zih-Yun Chiu +1Robotic ManipulationSurgical Robotics

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA. · Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218 USA.

  15. From Reasoning to Action: Benchmarking Frontier AI Models on LIBERO-10 Robot Manipulation Tasks

    Oct 21, 2026May Espinola, Qifan Zhang, Yu XiangRobotic ManipulationZero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

    Intelligent Robotics and Vision Lab Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas

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

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

  17. OMAR: Open-World Multi-Attribute Reasoning for Scene-Conditioned Shelf Organization

    Oct 21, 2026Benedikt Kreis, Rohit Menon, Benno Wingender +3Robotic ManipulationMultimodal Spatial Reasoning

    Humanoid Robots Lab, University of Bonn, Germany. · Center for Robotics, University of Bonn, Germany. · Lamarr Institute for ML and AI, Bonn, Germany. +1

  18. Reconstruction-Augmented Visuomotor Pre-Training of 3D-Grounded Bimanual Dexterity from RGB-Only Human Videos

    Oct 21, 2026Xingyi He, Zhiwen Qiu, Adhitya Polavaram +5Robotic ManipulationBimanual Robotic Manipulation

    Cornell University

  19. FlowVLA: Learning Flow-Aware Physical Completion for Quantitative Robotic Pouring

    Oct 21, 2026Liwen Yang, Yutian Zhang, Jiaqi Zhai +10Robotic ManipulationVLMs for Robotics

    Zhejiang University · DEEP Robotics · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory +2

  20. From VLM Planners to Robotic Agents: Self-Evolving Harnesses for History-Dependent Manipulation

    Oct 21, 2026Tingwen Du, Haoyu Guo, Hanxue Zhang +9Robotic ManipulationLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

    University of Science and Technology of China · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +2

  21. Relational Geometry Forcing for World Action Models

    Oct 21, 2026Yuan Xu, Yixiang Chen, Qisen Ma +10World Models for RoboticsWorld Action Models

    CASIA · UCAS · Alibaba Group +1

  22. DepState-JEPA: Learning Depth-Grounded State Representation for Visual Perception and Manipulation

    Oct 21, 2026Xiujian Liang, Liuyuan Na, Zehao Du +6State Representation LearningVisual Representation Learning

    Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute (SII) · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +2

  23. SimPT: An Automated Simulation Framework for Intervention-Based VLA Post-Training

    Oct 21, 2026Caicheng Wang, Zipeng Ye, Zhexuan Zhou +3VLA Model Post-TrainingVision-Language-Action Models

    Meituan

  24. PHD-Hand: A Printable Humanoid Dexterous Hand with Linkage-Driven 3-DOA Digits

    Oct 21, 2026Neel Adwani, Muhaiminul Islam Akash, Saffia Ouali +2Robotic Hand DesignRobotic Manipulation

    Electrical and Computer Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) · Union County Magnet High School, USA

  25. Real2Sem2Real: 3D Semantic Augmentations for Robot Learning from a Single Human RGB Demonstration

    Oct 20, 2026Matthew Strong, Ankush K. Dhawan, Julien Poffet +3Robot Learning from VideoSynthetic Data Generation for Robotics

    Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA · D-MAVT, ETH Zurich, Switzerland; work done while visiting Stanford University

  26. 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

  27. Learning Adaptable Dexterous Skills via Hybrid Dexterous Mimicking

    Oct 20, 2026Yuxuan Kuang, Jiashun Wang, Yixuan Sun +5Robot Skill LearningRobotic Manipulation

    Carnegie Mellon University · NVIDIA

  28. UniWALM: Unified World Action Language Model for Embodied Robot Control

    Oct 20, 2026Rahul Sajnani, Diego Romeres, Mingyuan Zhang +9Vision-Language-Action ModelsWorld Models for VLA Models

    Brown University · Amazon · Northeastern University +2

  29. Plausible Future, Wrong Choice: Steering World-Action Models toward Intended Future

    Oct 20, 2026Zhuohao Li, Jiawei He, Yuxuan Yan +11World Models for RoboticsWorld Action Models

    1Sun Yat-sen University · 2Shenzhen Loop Area Institute · 3The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) +7

  30. SPAR: Search-trained Push Action Ranker for Efficient Navigation Among Movable Obstacles

    Oct 20, 2026Dhruv Metha Ramesh, Tri-An Nguyen, Junshan Huang +3Robotic Object PushingRobot Motion Planning