Robotic Manipulation

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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

1,685 papers341 papers in the last four weeks, up 29% on the four weeks before. 2.0% of all new papers.

Mar 5, 2026

Designing and Validating a Self-Aligning Tool Changer for Modular Reconfigurable Manipulation Robots

Modular reconfigurable robots require reliable mechanisms for automated module exchange, but conventional rigid active couplings often fail due to inevitable positioning and orientational errors. To address this, we propose a misalignment-tolerant tool-changing system. The hardware features a motor-driven coupling utilizing passive self-alignment geometries, specifically chamfered receptacles and triangular lead-in guides, to robustly compensate for angular and lateral misalignments without complex force sensors. To make this autonomous exchange practically feasible, the mechanism is complemented by a compact rotating tool exchange station for efficient module storage. Real-world autonomous tool-picking experiments validate that the self-aligning features successfully absorb execution errors, enabling highly reliable robotic tool reconfiguration.

Mahfudz Maskur, Takuya Kiyokawa, Kensuke Harada

Department of Systems Innovation, Graduate School of Engineering Science, The University of Osaka, 1-3 Machikaneyama, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan. · Industrial Cyber-physical Systems Research Center, The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), 2-3-26 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan.

Modular Robotics Robotic Manipulation Robotic Insertion

Mar 4, 2026

ManipulationNet: An Infrastructure for Benchmarking Real-World Robot Manipulation with Physical Skill Challenges and Embodied Multimodal Reasoning

Dexterous manipulation enables robots to purposefully alter the physical world, transforming them from passive observers into active agents in unstructured environments. This capability is the cornerstone of physical artificial intelligence. Despite decades of advances in hardware, perception, control, and learning, progress toward general manipulation systems remains fragmented due to the absence of widely adopted standard benchmarks. The central challenge lies in reconciling the variability of the real world with the reproducibility and authenticity required for rigorous scientific evaluation. To address this, we introduce ManipulationNet, a global infrastructure that hosts real-world benchmark tasks for robotic manipulation. ManipulationNet delivers reproducible task setups through standardized hardware kits, and enables distributed performance evaluation via a unified software client that delivers real-time task instructions and collects benchmarking results. As a persistent and scalable infrastructure, ManipulationNet organizes benchmark tasks into two complementary tracks: 1) the Physical Skills Track, which evaluates low-level physical interaction skills, and 2) the Embodied Reasoning Track, which tests high-level reasoning and multimodal grounding abilities. This design fosters the systematic growth of an interconnected network of real-world abilities and skills, paving the path toward general robotic manipulation. By enabling comparable manipulation research in the real world at scale, this infrastructure establishes a sustainable foundation for measuring long-term scientific progress and identifying capabilities ready for real-world deployment.

Yiting Chen, Kenneth Kimble, Edward H. Adelson +20

Rice University · U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology · Massachusetts Institute of Technology +12

Robotic Manipulation Robot Manipulation Benchmarks Embodied Reasoning Multimodal Grounding

Mar 4, 2026

RoboLight: A Dataset with Linearly Composable Illumination for Robotic Manipulation

In this paper, we introduce RoboLight, the first real-world robotic manipulation dataset capturing synchronized episodes under systematically varied lighting conditions. RoboLight consists of two components. (a) RoboLight-Real contains 2,800 real-world episodes collected in our custom Light Cube setup, a calibrated system equipped with eight programmable RGB LED lights. It includes structured illumination variation along three independently controlled dimensions: color, direction, and intensity. Each dimension is paired with a dedicated task featuring objects of diverse geometries and materials to induce perceptual challenges. All image data are recorded in high-dynamic-range (HDR) format to preserve radiometric accuracy. Leveraging the linearity of light transport, we introduce (b) RoboLight-Synthetic, comprising 196,000 episodes synthesized through interpolation in the HDR image space of RoboLight-Real. In principle, RoboLight-Synthetic can be arbitrarily expanded by refining the interpolation granularity. We further verify the dataset quality through qualitative analysis and real-world policy roll-outs, analyzing task difficulty, distributional diversity, and the effectiveness of synthesized data. We additionally demonstrate three representative use cases of the proposed dataset. The full dataset, along with the system software and hardware design, will be released as open-source to support continued research.

Shutong Jin, Jin Yang, Muhammad Zahid +1

School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Robot Manipulation Datasets Robotic Data Collection Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Robotic Manipulation Robotic Perception

Mar 4, 2026

GarmentPile++: Affordance-Driven Cluttered Garments Retrieval with Vision-Language Reasoning

Garment manipulation has attracted increasing attention due to its critical role in home-assistant robotics. However, the majority of existing garment manipulation works assume an initial state consisting of only one garment, while piled garments are far more common in real-world settings. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel garment retrieval pipeline that can not only follow language instruction to execute safe and clean retrieval but also guarantee exactly one garment is retrieved per attempt, establishing a robust foundation for the execution of downstream tasks (e.g., folding, hanging, wearing). Our pipeline seamlessly integrates vision-language reasoning with visual affordance perception, fully leveraging the high-level reasoning and planning capabilities of VLMs alongside the generalization power of visual affordance for low-level actions. To enhance the VLM's comprehensive awareness of each garment's state within a garment pile, we employ visual segmentation model (SAM2) to execute object segmentation on the garment pile for aiding VLM-based reasoning with sufficient visual cues. A mask fine-tuning mechanism is further integrated to address scenarios where the initial segmentation results are suboptimal. In addition, a dual-arm cooperation framework is deployed to address cases involving large or long garments, as well as excessive garment sagging caused by incorrect grasping point determination, both of which are strenuous for a single arm to handle. The effectiveness of our pipeline are consistently demonstrated across diverse tasks and varying scenarios in both real-world and simulation environments. Project page: https://garmentpile2.github.io/.

Mingleyang Li, Yuran Wang, Yue Chen +6

Peking University · The University of Hong Kong · Northwestern University

Affordance-Based Robotic Manipulation Robotic Manipulation Deformable Object Manipulation

Mar 4, 2026

Structural Action Transformer for 3D Dexterous Manipulation

Achieving human-level dexterity in robots via imitation learning from heterogeneous datasets is hindered by the challenge of cross-embodiment skill transfer, particularly for high-DoF robotic hands. Existing methods, often relying on 2D observations and temporal-centric action representation, struggle to capture 3D spatial relations and fail to handle embodiment heterogeneity. This paper proposes the Structural Action Transformer (SAT), a new 3D dexterous manipulation policy that challenges this paradigm by introducing a structural-centric perspective. We reframe each action chunk not as a temporal sequence, but as a variable-length, unordered sequence of joint-wise trajectories. This structural formulation allows a Transformer to natively handle heterogeneous embodiments, treating the joint count as a variable sequence length. To encode structural priors and resolve ambiguity, we introduce an Embodied Joint Codebook that embeds each joint's functional role and kinematic properties. Our model learns to generate these trajectories from 3D point clouds via a continuous-time flow matching objective. We validate our approach by pre-training on large-scale heterogeneous datasets and fine-tuning on simulation and real-world dexterous manipulation tasks. Our method consistently outperforms all baselines, demonstrating superior sample efficiency and effective cross-embodiment skill transfer. This structural-centric representation offers a new path toward scaling policies for high-DoF, heterogeneous manipulators.

Xiaohan Lei, Min Wang, Bohong Weng +2

MoE Key Laboratory of Brain-inspired Intelligent Perception and Cognition, University of Science and Technology of China · Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center

Robotic Manipulation Robot Imitation Learning Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Trajectory Representation Learning

Mar 4, 2026

SkillVLA: Tackling Combinatorial Diversity in Dual-Arm Manipulation via Skill Reuse

Recent progress in vision-language-action (VLA) models has demonstrated strong potential for dual-arm manipulation, enabling complex behaviors and generalization to unseen environments. However, mainstream bimanual VLA formulations largely overlook the critical challenge of combinatorial diversity. Different pairings of single-arm behaviors can induce qualitatively distinct task behaviors, yet existing models do not explicitly account for this structure. We argue that effective bimanual VLAs should support skill reuse - the ability to recombine previously learned single-arm skills across novel left-right pairings - thereby avoiding the need to separately learn every possible combination. Current VLA designs entangle skills across arms, preventing such recomposition and limiting scalability. To address this limitation, we propose SkillVLA, a framework explicitly designed to enable skill reuse in dual-arm manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SkillVLA substantially improves skill composition, increasing overall success rate from 0% to 51%, and achieves strong performance on cooperative and long-horizon tasks.

Xuanran Zhai, Zekai Huang, Longyan Wu +5

National University of Singapore · Shanghai Innovation Institute · Fudan University +4

Bimanual Robotic Manipulation Robotic Manipulation Vision-Language-Action Models Generalization in Robotic Manipulation

Mar 4, 2026

Learning Surgical Robotic Manipulation with 3D Spatial Priors

Achieving 3D spatial awareness is crucial for surgical robotic manipulation, where precise and delicate operations are required. Existing methods either explicitly reconstruct the surgical scene prior to manipulation, or enhance multi-view features by adding wrist-mounted cameras to supplement the default stereo endoscopes. However, both paradigms suffer from notable limitations: the former easily leads to error accumulation and prevents end-to-end optimization due to its multi-stage nature, while the latter is rarely adopted in clinical practice since wrist-mounted cameras can interfere with the motion of surgical robot arms. In this work, we introduce the Spatial Surgical Transformer (SST), an end-to-end visuomotor policy that empowers surgical robots with 3D spatial awareness by directly exploring 3D spatial cues embedded in endoscopic images. First, we build Surgical3D, a large-scale photorealistic dataset containing 30K stereo endoscopic image pairs with accurate 3D geometry, addressing the scarcity of 3D data in surgical scenes. Based on Surgical3D, we finetune a powerful geometric transformer to extract robust 3D latent representations from stereo endoscopes images. These representations are then seamlessly aligned with the robot's action space via a lightweight multi-level spatial feature connector (MSFC), all within an endoscope-centric coordinate frame. Extensive real-robot experiments demonstrate that SST achieves state-of-the-art performance and strong spatial generalization on complex surgical tasks such as knot tying and ex-vivo organ dissection, representing a significant step toward practical clinical deployment. The dataset and code will be released.

Yu Sheng, Lidian Wang, Xiaomeng Chu +6

University of Science and Technology of China · Tuodao Medical · Yale University

Robotic Manipulation Surgical Robotics 3D Scene Understanding Generalization in Robotic Manipulation 3D ViTs

Mar 3, 2026

Act-Observe-Rewrite: Multimodal Coding Agents as In-Context Policy Learners for Robot Manipulation

Can a multimodal language model learn to manipulate physical objects by reasoning about its own failures-without gradient updates, demonstrations, or reward engineering? We argue the answer is yes, under conditions we characterise precisely. We present Act-Observe-Rewrite (AOR), a framework in which an LLM agent improves a robot manipulation policy by synthesising entirely new executable Python controller code between trials, guided by visual observations and structured episode outcomes. Unlike prior work that grounds LLMs in pre-defined skill libraries or uses code generation for one-shot plan synthesis, AOR makes the full low-level motor control implementation the unit of LLM reasoning, enabling the agent to change not just what the robot does, but how it does it. The central claim is that interpretable code as the policy representation creates a qualitatively different kind of in-context learning from opaque neural policies: the agent can diagnose systematic failures and rewrite their causes. We validate this across three robosuite manipulation tasks and report promising results, with the agent achieving high success rates without demonstrations, reward engineering, or gradient updates.

Vaishak Kumar

General Bionix, Inc.

Code Generation for Robotics Robot Policy Learning ICL for Robotics Robotic Manipulation VLMs for Robotics Code Generation

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 3, 2026

Robotic Grasping and Placement Controlled by EEG-Based Hybrid Visual and Motor Imagery

We present a framework that integrates EEG-based visual and motor imagery (VI/MI) with robotic control to enable real-time, intention-driven grasping and placement. Motivated by the promise of BCI-driven robotics to enhance human-robot interaction, this system bridges neural signals with physical control by deploying offline-pretrained decoders in a zero-shot manner within an online streaming pipeline. This establishes a dual-channel intent interface that translates visual intent into robotic actions, with VI identifying objects for grasping and MI determining placement poses, enabling intuitive control over both what to grasp and where to place. The system operates solely on EEG via a cue-free imagery protocol, achieving integration and online validation. Implemented on a Base robotic platform and evaluated across diverse scenarios, including occluded targets or varying participant postures, the system achieves online decoding accuracies of 40.23% (VI) and 62.59% (MI), with an end-to-end task success rate of 20.88%. These results demonstrate that high-level visual cognition can be decoded in real time and translated into executable robot commands, bridging the gap between neural signals and physical interaction, and validating the flexibility of a purely imagery-based BCI paradigm for practical human-robot collaboration.

Yichang Liu, Tianyu Wang, Ziyi Ye +4

Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-inspired Intelligence (ISTBI), Fudan University · School of Data Science, Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute +3

Human-Robot Interaction Robotic Grasping Robotic Manipulation EEG-Based Visual Decoding

Mar 3, 2026

Learning Object-Centric Spatial Reasoning for Sequential Manipulation in Cluttered Environments

Robotic manipulation in cluttered environments presents a critical challenge for automation. Recent large-scale, end-to-end models demonstrate impressive capabilities but often lack the data efficiency and modularity required for retrieving objects in dense clutter. In this work, we argue for a paradigm of specialized, decoupled systems and present Unveiler, a framework that explicitly separates high-level spatial reasoning from low-level action execution. Unveiler's core is a lightweight, transformer-based Spatial Relationship Encoder (SRE) that sequentially identifies the most critical obstacle for removal. This discrete decision is then passed to a rotation-invariant Action Decoder for execution. We demonstrate that this decoupled architecture is not only more computationally efficient in terms of parameter count and inference time, but also significantly outperforms both classic end-to-end policies and modern, large-model-based baselines in retrieving targets from dense clutter. The SRE is trained in two stages: imitation learning from heuristic demonstrations provides sample-efficient initialization, after which PPO fine-tuning enables the policy to discover removal strategies that surpass the heuristic in dense clutter. Our results, achieving up to 97.6% success in partially occluded and 90.0% in fully occluded scenarios in simulation, make a case for the power of specialized, object-centric reasoning in complex manipulation tasks. Additionally, we demonstrate that the SRE's spatial reasoning transfers zero-shot to real scenes, and validate the full system on a physical robot requiring only geometric workspace calibration; no learned components are retrained.

Chrisantus Eze, Ryan C Julian, Christopher Crick

Oklahoma State University · Google DeepMind

Robotic Manipulation Spatial Reasoning

Mar 2, 2026

ACDC: Adaptive Curriculum Planning with Dynamic Contrastive Control for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning in Robotic Manipulation

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning has shown considerable potential in robotic manipulation; however, existing approaches remain limited by their reliance on prioritizing collected experience, resulting in suboptimal performance across diverse tasks. Inspired by human learning behaviors, we propose a more comprehensive learning paradigm, ACDC, which integrates multidimensional Adaptive Curriculum (AC) Planning with Dynamic Contrastive (DC) Control to guide the agent along a well-designed learning trajectory. More specifically, at the planning level, the AC component schedules the learning curriculum by dynamically balancing diversity-driven exploration and quality-driven exploitation based on the agent's success rate and training progress. At the control level, the DC component implements the curriculum plan through norm-constrained contrastive learning, enabling magnitude-guided experience selection aligned with the current curriculum focus. Extensive experiments on challenging robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that ACDC consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in both sample efficiency and final task success rate.

Xuerui Wang, Guangyu Ren, Tianhong Dai +4

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA · Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China · Applied Computing, UK

Goal-Conditioned RL Goal-Conditioned Robotic Manipulation Curriculum RL Data-Efficient Robot Learning Curriculum Learning Robotic Manipulation+1

Mar 2, 2026

From Transportation to Manipulation: Transforming Magnetic Levitation to Magnetic Robotics

Magnetic Levitation (MagLev) systems fundamentally increase the flexibility of in-machine material flow in industrial automation. Therefore, these systems enable dynamic throughput optimization, which is especially beneficial for high-mix low-volume manufacturing. Until now, MagLev installations have been used primarily for in-machine transport, while their potential for manipulation is largely unexplored. This paper introduces the 6D-Platform MagBot, a low-cost six degrees of freedom parallel kinematic that couples two movers into a composite robotic platform. Experiments show that the 6D-Platform MagBot achieves sub-millimeter positioning accuracy and supports fully autonomous pick up and drop off via a docking station, allowing rapid and repeatable reconfiguration of the machine. Relative to a single mover, the proposed platform substantially expands the reachable workspace, payload, and functional dexterity. By unifying transportation and manipulation, this work advances Magnetic Levitation towards Magnetic Robotics, enabling manufacturing solutions that are more agile, efficient, and adaptable.

Lara Bergmann, Noah Greis, Klaus Neumann

CITEC, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University, 33619 Bielefeld, Germany · Fraunhofer IOSB-INA, 32657 Lemgo, Germany

Robotics Robotic Manipulation Industrial Robotics

Mar 2, 2026

Shape-Interpretable Visual Self-Modeling Enables Geometry-Aware Continuum Robot Control

Continuum robots possess high flexibility and redundancy, making them well suited for safe interaction in complex environments, yet their continuous deformation and nonlinear dynamics pose fundamental challenges to perception, modeling, and control. Existing vision-based control approaches often rely on end-to-end learning, achieving shape regulation without explicit awareness of robot geometry or its interaction with the environment. Here, we introduce a shape-interpretable visual self-modeling framework for continuum robots that enables geometry-aware control. Robot shapes are encoded from multi-view planar images using a Bezier-curve representation, transforming visual observations into a compact and physically meaningful shape space that uniquely characterizes the robot's three-dimensional configuration. Based on this representation, neural ordinary differential equations are employed to self-model both shape and end-effector dynamics directly from data, enabling hybrid shape-position control without analytical models or dense body markers. The explicit geometric structure of the learned shape space allows the robot to reason about its body and surroundings, supporting environment-aware behaviors such as obstacle avoidance and self-motion while maintaining end-effector objectives. Experiments on a cable-driven continuum robot demonstrate accurate shape-position regulation and tracking, with shape errors within 1.56% of image resolution and end-effector errors within 2% of robot length, as well as robust performance in constrained environments. By elevating visual shape representations from two-dimensional observations to an interpretable three-dimensional self-model, this work establishes a principled alternative to vision-based end-to-end control and advances autonomous, geometry-aware manipulation for continuum robots.

Peng Yu, Xin Wang, Ning Tan

School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China.

Continuum Robot Control Vision-Based Robot Control Continuum Robot Shape Estimation Robotic Manipulation Robot Dynamics Learning

Mar 2, 2026

Towards Robot Skill Learning and Adaptation with Gaussian Processes

General robot skill adaptation requires expressive representations robust to varying task configurations. While recent learning-based skill adaptation methods refined via Reinforcement Learning (RL), have shown success, existing skill models often lack sufficient representational capacity for anything beyond minor environmental changes. In contrast, Gaussian Process (GP)-based skill modelling provides an expressive representation with useful analytical properties; however, adaptation of GP-based skills remains underexplored. This paper proposes a novel, robust skill adaptation framework that utilises GPs with sparse via-points for compact and expressive modelling. The model considers the trajectory's poses and leverages its first and second analytical derivatives to preserve the skill's kinematic profile. We present three adaptation methods to cater for the variability between initial and observed configurations. Firstly, an optimisation agent that adjusts the path's via-points while preserving the demonstration velocity. Second, a behaviour cloning agent trained to replicate output trajectories from the optimisation agent. Lastly, an RL agent that has learnt to modify via-points whilst maintaining the kinematic profile and enabling online capabilities. Evaluated across three tasks (drawer opening, cube-pushing and bar manipulation) in both simulation and hardware, our proposed methods outperform every benchmark in success rates. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that the GP-based representation enables all three methods to attain high cosine similarity and low velocity magnitude errors, indicating strong preservation of the kinematic profile. Overall, our formulation provides a compact representation capable of adapting to large deviations from a single demonstrated skill.

A K M Nadimul Haque, Fouad Sukkar, Sheila Sutjipto +3

Robot Skill Learning Robot Learning Robotic Manipulation Trajectory Representation Learning

Mar 2, 2026

Multimodal Adversarial Quality Policy for Safe Grasping

Vision-guided robot grasping based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) generalizes well but poses safety risks in the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Recent works solved it by designing benign adversarial attacks and patches with RGB modality, yet depth-independent characteristics limit their effectiveness on RGBD modality. In this work, we propose the Multimodal Adversarial Quality Policy (MAQP) to realize multimodal safe grasping. Our framework introduces two key components. First, the Heterogeneous Dual-Patch Optimization Scheme (HDPOS) mitigates the distribution discrepancy between RGB and depth modalities in patch generation by adopting modality-specific initialization strategies, employing a Gaussian distribution for depth patches and a uniform distribution for RGB patches, while jointly optimizing both modalities under a unified objective function. Second, the Gradient-Level Modality Balancing Strategy (GLMBS) is designed to resolve the optimization imbalance from RGB and Depth patches in patch shape adaptation by reweighting gradient contributions based on per-channel sensitivity analysis and applying distance-adaptive perturbation bounds. We conduct extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets and a cobot, showing the effectiveness of MAQP.

Kunlin Xie, Chenghao Li, Haolan Zhang +1

The authors are with the School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Nomi, Ishikawa 923-1292, Japan

Safe Robot Manipulation Robotic Grasping Robotic Manipulation Adversarial Patch Attacks Multimodal Robustness

Mar 2, 2026

Mean-Flow based One-Step Vision-Language-Action

Recent advances in FlowMatching-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks have demonstrated remarkable advantages in generating high-frequency action chunks, particularly for highly dexterous robotic manipulation tasks. Despite these notable achievements, their practical applications are constrained by prolonged generation latency, which stems from inherent iterative sampling requirements and architectural limitations. To address this critical bottleneck, we propose a Mean-Flow based One-Step VLA approach. Specifically, we resolve the noise-induced issues in the action generation process, thereby eliminating the consistency constraints inherent to conventional Flow-Matching methods. This significantly enhances generation efficiency and enables one-step action generation. Real-world robotic experiments show that the generation speed of the proposed Mean-Flow based One-Step VLA is 8.7 times and 83.9 times faster than that of SmolVLA and Diffusion Policy, respectively. These results elucidate its great potential as a high-efficiency backbone for VLA-based robotic manipulation.

Yang Chen, Xiaoguang Ma, Bin Zhao

Efficient VLA Model Inference Vision-Language-Action Models Robotic Manipulation Mean Flow

Mar 2, 2026

PhysGraph: Physically-Grounded Graph-Transformer Policies for Bimanual Dexterous Hand-Tool-Object Manipulation

Bimanual dexterous manipulation for tool use remains a formidable challenge in robotics due to the high-dimensional state space and complicated contact dynamics. Existing methods naively represent the entire system state as a single configuration vector, disregarding the rich structural and topological information inherent to articulated hands. We present PhysGraph, a physically-grounded graph transformer policy designed explicitly for challenging bimanual hand-tool-object manipulation. Unlike prior works, we represent the bimanual system as a kinematic graph and introduce per-link tokenization to preserve fine-grained local state information. We propose a physically-grounded bias generator that injects structural priors directly into the attention mechanism, including kinematic spatial distance, dynamic contact states, geometric proximity, and anatomical properties. This allows the policy to explicitly reason about physical interactions rather than learning them implicitly from sparse rewards. Extensive experiments show that PhysGraph significantly outperforms baseline - ManipTrans in manipulation precision and task success rates while using only 51% of the parameters of ManipTrans. Furthermore, the inherent topological flexibility of our architecture shows qualitative zero-shot transfer to unseen tool/object geometries, and is sufficiently general to be trained on three robotic hands (Shadow, Allegro, Inspire).

Runfa Blark Li, David Kim, Xinshuang Liu +7

University of California, San Diego

Bimanual Robotic Manipulation Robotic Tool Use Robotic Manipulation

Mar 1, 2026

RMBench: Memory-Dependent Robotic Manipulation Benchmark with Insights into Policy Design

Robotic manipulation policies have made rapid progress in recent years, yet most existing approaches give limited consideration to memory capabilities. Consequently, they struggle to solve tasks that require reasoning over historical observations and maintaining task-relevant information over time, which are common requirements in real-world manipulation scenarios. Although several memory-aware policies have been proposed, systematic evaluation of memory-dependent manipulation remains underexplored, and the relationship between architectural design choices and memory performance is still not well understood. To address this gap, we introduce RMBench, a simulation benchmark comprising 9 manipulation tasks that span multiple levels of memory complexity, enabling systematic evaluation of policy memory capabilities. We further propose Mem-0, a modular manipulation policy with explicit memory components designed to support controlled ablation studies. Through extensive simulation and real-world experiments, we identify memory-related limitations in existing policies and provide empirical insights into how architectural design choices influence memory performance. The website is available at https://rmbench.github.io/.

Tianxing Chen, Yuran Wang, Mingleyang Li +16

PKU · PsiBot · HKUST (GZ) +3

Robotic Manipulation Robot Policy Learning Robot Manipulation Benchmarks Robotic Policy Evaluation

Mar 1, 2026

DAM-VLA: A Dynamic Action Model-Based Vision-Language-Action Framework for Robot Manipulation

In dynamic environments such as warehouses, hospitals, and homes, robots must seamlessly transition between gross motion and precise manipulations to complete complex tasks. However, current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks, largely adapted from pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), often struggle to reconcile general task adaptability with the specialized precision required for intricate manipulation. To address this challenge, we propose DAM-VLA, a dynamic action model-based VLA framework. DAM-VLA integrates VLM reasoning with diffusion-based action models specialized for arm and gripper control. Specifically, it introduces (i) an action routing mechanism, using task-specific visual and linguistic cues to select appropriate action models (e.g., arm movement or gripper manipulation), (ii) a dynamic action model that fuses high-level VLM cognition with low-level visual features to predict actions, and (iii) a dual-scale action weighting mechanism that enables dynamic coordination between the arm-movement and gripper-manipulation models. Across extensive evaluations, DAM-VLA achieves superior success rates compared to state-of-the-art VLA methods in simulated (SIMPLER, FurnitureBench) and real-world settings, showing robust generalization from standard pick-and-place to demanding long-horizon and contact-rich tasks.

Xiongfeng Peng, Jiaqian Yu, Dingzhe Li +8

Advanced Research Lab, Samsung R&D Institute China-Beijing (SRCB), China · Samsung AI Center, DS Division, South Korea · Hanyang University ERICA, South Korea

Robotic Manipulation Vision-Language-Action Models Dynamic Robotic Manipulation Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

Mar 1, 2026

Minimalist Compliance Control

Compliance control is essential for safe physical interaction, yet its adoption is limited by hardware requirements such as force torque sensors. While recent reinforcement learning approaches aim to bypass these constraints, they often suffer from sim-to-real gaps, lack safety guarantees, and add system complexity. We propose Minimalist Compliance Control, which enables compliant behavior using only motor current or voltage signals readily available in modern servos and quasi-direct-drive motors, without force sensors, current control, or learning. External wrenches are estimated from actuator signals and Jacobians and incorporated into a task-space admittance controller, preserving sufficient force measurement accuracy for stable and responsive compliance control. Our method is embodiment-agnostic and plug-and-play with diverse high-level planners. We validate our approach on a robot arm, a dexterous hand, and two humanoid robots across multiple contact-rich tasks, using vision-language models, imitation learning, and model-based planning. The results demonstrate robust, safe, and compliant interaction across embodiments and planning paradigms.

Haochen Shi, Songbo Hu, Yifan Hou +3

Stanford University

Compliant Robot Control Virtual Sensing Admittance Control Robotic Manipulation Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

Feb 28, 2026

UniHM: Unified Dexterous Hand Manipulation with Vision Language Model

Planning physically feasible dexterous hand manipulation is a central challenge in robotic manipulation and Embodied AI. Prior work typically relies on object-centric cues or precise hand-object interaction sequences, foregoing the rich, compositional guidance of open-vocabulary instruction. We introduce UniHM, the first framework for unified dexterous hand manipulation guided by free-form language commands. We propose a Unified Hand-Dexterous Tokenizer that maps heterogeneous dexterous-hand morphologies into a single shared codebook, improving cross-dexterous hand generalization and scalability to new morphologies. Our vision language action model is trained solely on human-object interaction data, eliminating the need for massive real-world teleoperation datasets, and demonstrates strong generalizability in producing human-like manipulation sequences from open-ended language instructions. To ensure physical realism, we introduce a physics-guided dynamic refinement module that performs segment-wise joint optimization under generative and temporal priors, yielding smooth and physically feasible manipulation sequences. Across multiple datasets and real-world evaluations, UniHM attains state-of-the-art results on both seen and unseen objects and trajectories, demonstrating strong generalization and high physical feasibility. Our project page at https://unihm.github.io/.

Zhenhao Zhang, Jiaxin Liu, Ye Shi +1

ShanghaiTech University · InstAdapt

Robotic Manipulation Language-Conditioned Robot Manipulation Vision-Language-Action Models Hand-Object Interaction Generalization in Robotic Manipulation Motion Representation Learning

Feb 27, 2026

Online World Modeling Enables Real-World Inverse Reinforcement Learning from Observation

Current methods in robot learning are fundamentally bottlenecked by one or more of: hand-designed rewards, simulation modeling, or action supervision (e.g. teleoperation) each requiring significant domain expertise, engineering effort, and robot-operator labor. Towards reducing these bottlenecks, this work pursues observational learning via Inverse Reinforcement Learning from Observation (IRLfO) in which only access to task observations (e.g. video) is assumed. Due to the challenging setting and limitations of RL methods, IRLfO has thus far remained impractical for real-world robot learning. Here, we present the first IRL method to learn visual manipulation in the real world from scratch, and the first real-world demonstration of positive online transfer across visual manipulation tasks from scratch. In under 40 minutes, MPAIL2 learns pick-and-place from scratch to 82%, where RL and BC with equal interaction and demonstration budgets reach only 0% and 12% despite their reward and action supervision. Interactive project page with training videos: https://uwrobotlearning.github.io/mpail2/

Tyler Han, Bat Nemekhbold, Siyang Shen +6

University of Washington

Robot Learning from Video Reinforcement Learning Robotic Manipulation Robot Imitation Learning

Feb 27, 2026

Learning to Build: Autonomous Robotic Assembly of Stable Structures Without Predefined Plans

This paper presents a novel autonomous robotic assembly framework for constructing stable structures without relying on predefined architectural blueprints. Instead of following fixed plans, construction tasks are defined through targets and obstacles, allowing the system to adapt more flexibly to environmental uncertainty and variations during the building process. A reinforcement learning (RL) policy, trained using deep Q-learning with successor features, serves as the decision-making component. As a proof of concept, we evaluate the approach on a benchmark of 15 2D robotic assembly tasks of discrete block construction. Experiments using a real-world closed-loop robotic setup demonstrate the feasibility of the method and its ability to handle construction noise. The results suggest that our framework offers a promising direction for more adaptable and robust robotic construction in real-world environments.

Jingwen Wang, Johannes Kirschner, Paul Rolland +2

Lab of Creative Computation, ´Ecole Polytechnique F´ed´erale de Lausanne · Swiss Data Science Center

Robotic Construction Sequential Decision Making Robotic RL Robotics Robotic Manipulation Robotic Assembly

Feb 27, 2026

ABPolicy: Asynchronous B-Spline Flow Policy for Real-Time and Smooth Robotic Manipulation

Robotic manipulation requires policies that are smooth and responsive to evolving observations. However, synchronous inference in the raw action space introduces several challenges, including intra-chunk jitter, inter-chunk discontinuities, and stop-and-go execution. These issues undermine a policy's smoothness and its responsiveness to environmental changes. We propose ABPolicy, an asynchronous flow-matching policy that operates in a B-spline control-point action space. First, the B-spline representation ensures intra-chunk smoothness. Second, we introduce bidirectional action prediction coupled with refitting optimization to enforce inter-chunk continuity. Finally, by leveraging asynchronous inference, ABPolicy delivers real-time, continuous updates. We evaluate ABPolicy across seven tasks encompassing both static settings and dynamic settings with moving objects. Empirical results indicate that ABPolicy reduces trajectory jerk, leading to smoother motion and improved performance. Project website: https://teee000.github.io/ABPolicy/.

Fan Yang, Peiguang Jing, Kaihua Qu +2

The authors are with the School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University

B-Spline Trajectory Representation Robot Policy Learning Robot Motion Generation Robotic Manipulation Real-Time Robot Control

Feb 27, 2026

Action-Geometry Prediction with 3D Geometric Prior for Bimanual Manipulation

Bimanual manipulation requires policies that can reason about 3D geometry, anticipate how it evolves under action, and generate smooth, coordinated motions. However, existing methods typically rely on 2D features with limited spatial awareness, or require explicit point clouds that are difficult to obtain reliably in real-world settings. At the same time, recent 3D geometric foundation models show that accurate and diverse 3D structure can be reconstructed directly from RGB images in a fast and robust manner. We leverage this opportunity and propose a framework that builds bimanual manipulation directly on a pre-trained 3D geometric foundation model. Our policy fuses geometry-aware latents, 2D semantic features, and proprioception into a unified state representation, and uses diffusion model to jointly predict a future action chunk and a future 3D latent that decodes into a dense pointmap. By explicitly predicting how the 3D scene will evolve together with the action sequence, the policy gains strong spatial understanding and predictive capability using only RGB observations. We evaluate our method both in simulation on the RoboTwin benchmark and in real-world robot executions. Our approach consistently outperforms 2D-based and point-cloud-based baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance in manipulation success, inter-arm coordination, and 3D spatial prediction accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/Chongyang-99/GAP.git.

Chongyang Xu, Haipeng Li, Shen Cheng +4

College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, China · Dexmal · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China +1

Bimanual Robotic Manipulation Robotic Manipulation

Feb 27, 2026

MicroPush: A Lightweight Simulator for Sim-to-Real Microrobotic Pushing and Assembly

Developing learning-based autonomy for microrobotic manipulation is difficult because physical trials are slow, variable, and poorly suited to large-scale training. We present MicroPush, a lightweight simulation and benchmarking environment for pushing and assembly with magnetic rolling microrobots. The simulator combines overdamped planar dynamics with calibrated rolling actuation, reduced-order contact handling, short-range interaction corrections, and optional background flow, while providing common interfaces for planning, model-based control, reinforcement learning (RL), interactive visualization, and headless evaluation. In no-render tests, MicroPush remains substantially faster than real time, reaching 37.0x real time with 100 passive particles. We further evaluate the simulator through zero-shot sim-to-real policy transfer. A Residual RL-MPC policy is trained entirely in MicroPush, frozen after simulation training, and deployed on the physical system without real-world policy fine-tuning. A 20 μm magnetic microrobot pushes a similarly sized silica particle along a figure-eight trajectory with 1.91 μm median and 4.65 μm 95th-percentile path error, and the same autonomy stack performs sequential line, triangle, and six-particle hexagonal assembly. These results show that a deliberately reduced-order simulator can provide an efficient training and development substrate for sim-to-real microrobotic autonomy.

Yanda Yang, Zion Lee, Sambeeta Das

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

Robot Policy Learning Robotics Simulation Sim-to-Real Transfer Robotic Manipulation Robot Manipulation Benchmarks Robotic Assembly

Feb 27, 2026

VCA: Vision-Click-Action Framework for Precise Manipulation of Segmented Objects in Target Ambiguous Environments

The reliance on language in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models introduces ambiguity, cognitive overhead, and difficulties in precise object identification and sequential task execution, particularly in environments with multiple visually similar objects. To address these limitations, we propose Vision-Click-Action (VCA), a framework that replaces verbose textual commands with direct, click-based visual interaction using pretrained segmentation models. By allowing operators to specify target objects clearly through visual selection in the robot's 2D camera view, VCA reduces interpretation errors, lowers cognitive load, and provides a practical and scalable alternative to language-driven interfaces for real-world robotic manipulation. Experimental results validate that the proposed VCA framework achieves effective instance-level manipulation of specified target objects. Experiment videos are available at https://robrosinc.github.io/vca/.

Donggeon Kim, Seungwon Jan, Hyeonjun Park +1

ROBROS Inc., Seoul, KS013, Republic of Korea

Robotic Manipulation Vision-Based Robot Control

Feb 27, 2026

Tilt-X: Enabling Compliant Aerial Manipulation through a Tiltable-Extensible Continuum Manipulator

Aerial manipulators extend the reach and manipulation capabilities of uncrewed multirotor aerial vehicles for inspection, agriculture, sampling, and delivery. Continuum arm aerial manipulation systems offer lightweight, dexterous, and compliant interaction opportunities. Existing designs allow manipulation only below the UAV which restricts their deployability in multiple directions and through clutter. They are also sensitive to propeller downwash. Addressing these limitations, we present Tilt-X, a continuum arm aerial manipulator that integrates a tilting mechanism, a telescopic stage, and a cable-driven continuum section. We present its design and kinematic model and validate it through flight demonstrations. Tilt-X enables a volumetric workspace with up to 75 mm extension and planar orientations between 0

^\circ

to 90

^\circ

. Experiments comparing end effector pose with and without downwash quantitatively measure its accuracy, providing critical evidence to guide the design and control of reliable aerial manipulators. Results show stabilisation of end effector pose as the manipulator extends out of the propeller influence zone.

Anuraj Uthayasooriyan, Krishna Manaswi Digumarti, Jack Breward +3

QUT Centre for Robotics, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD Australia 4000 · School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD Australia 4000 · REF,Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD Australia 4000

Aerial Manipulation Aerial Robotics Robotic Manipulation Soft Robotics

Feb 26, 2026

Interface-Aware Trajectory Reconstruction of Limited Demonstrations for Robot Learning

Assistive robots offer agency to humans with severe motor impairments. Often, these users control high-DoF robots through low-dimensional interfaces, such as using a 1-D sip-and-puff interface to operate a 6-DoF robotic arm. This mismatch results in having access to only a subset of control dimensions at a given time, imposing unintended and artificial constraints on robot motion. As a result, interface-limited demonstrations embed suboptimal motions that reflect interface restrictions rather than user intent. To address this, we present a trajectory reconstruction algorithm that reasons about task, environment, and interface constraints to lift demonstrations into the robot's full control space. We evaluate our approach using real-world demonstrations of ADL-inspired tasks performed via a 2-D joystick and 1-D sip-and-puff control interface, teleoperating two distinct 7-DoF robotic arms. Analyses of the reconstructed demonstrations and derived control policies show that lifted trajectories are faster and more efficient than their interface-constrained counterparts while respecting user preferences.

Demiana R. Barsoum, Mahdieh Nejati Javaremi, Larisa Y. C. Loke +1

Northwestern University & Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Learning from Suboptimal Demonstrations Trajectory Inference Learning from Demonstration Assistive Robotics Robotic Manipulation Robot Imitation Learning