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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1,704 papers341 papers in the last four weeks, up 29% on the four weeks before. 2.0% of all new papers.

  1. 3DROID: A Renderable 3D Gaussian Dataset with Measured Per-Scene Reliability

    Oct 1, 2026Wonguen Cho, Junhoo Lee, Nojun Kwak3D Gaussian SplattingRobot Manipulation Datasets

    Seoul National University · KAIST

  2. ATI-VLA: Action-Centric Predictive Vision-Language-Action Models via Actionable Alignment Then Adaptive Injection

    Oct 1, 2026Yijie Zhu, Rui Shao, Jie He +8Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

    Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen · Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Great Bay University · Shenzhen Loop Area Institute +3

  3. Query-Conditioned Articulation Estimation from a Single Image

    Oct 1, 2026Abdelrhman Werby, Fabio Scaparro, Kai O. ArrasArticulated Object ReconstructionRobotic Manipulation

    Socially Intelligent Robotics Lab, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Stuttgart, Germany

  4. ActiveWAM: Evidence-Aware Active Vision for World-Action Models

    Oct 1, 2026Renjun Wu, Luzhou Ge, Xuesong LiWorld Action ModelsMulti-Task Robotic Manipulation

    Beijing Institute of Technology

  5. ALFRED: Requirement-driven development of an open-source mobile manipulator for long-term plant monitoring

    Oct 1, 2026Ciarán Miceal Johnson, Christopher Quail, Garry Ellard +3Modular RoboticsMobile Robotics

  6. Recova: Agent-Guided Failure Recovery for Autonomous Robotic Manipulation

    Oct 1, 2026Isabella Liu, An-Chieh Cheng, Johan Bjorck +6Robot Failure RecoveryHuman-in-the-Loop AI

    University of California, San Diego · NVIDIA · University of Texas at Austin

  7. WBAG: A Whole-Body and Attached-Geometry Safety Framework for Vision-Language-Action Manipulation

    Oct 1, 2026Samuel Zhen, Siwon Jo, Yanze Zhang +1Control Barrier FunctionsRobot Safety

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA. · GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. · Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607, USA.

  8. quARtet Marker: A 3D-Printable Multi-Tag Fiducial for Robust Near-Frontal Pose Estimation

    Oct 1, 2026Araki Wakiuchi, Hikaru Sasaki, Takamitsu MatsubaraObject Pose EstimationRobotic Manipulation

    Materials Informatics Initiative, RD Technology and Digital Transformation Center, JSR Corporation, 3-103-9 Tonomachi, Kawasaki-ku, Kawasaki, Kanagawa, Japan, 210-0821. · Division of Information Science, Graduate School of Science and Technology, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, 8916-5 Takayama-cho, Ikoma, Nara, Japan, 630-0192.

  9. eRLT: Efficient VLA Reinforcement Learning via Action-Relevant Token Routing

    Oct 1, 2026Dehao Huang, Jianbang Liu, Jianpan Gao +7Efficient VLA ModelsRobotic Manipulation

    Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China. · Beijing Zhongguancun Academy, Beijing, China. · Samsung Robotics eXperience. +2

  10. Screw Attention: Rigid-Body Algebra Inside a Transformer

    Oct 1, 2026Aly MagassoubaMultibody DynamicsEquivariant Neural Networks

    School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom

  11. Getting Out and Getting Back: World and Behavior Grounding in Real2Sim2Real Co-Training

    Sep 30, 2026Samuel Liu, Youngsun Kim, Martin Matak +1Sim-to-Real TransferSynthetic Data Generation for Robotics

    University of Cambridge · Industrial Next

  12. TacDyn-WAM: Learning Implicit Tactile Dynamics in a Heterogeneous Visuo-Tactile World Action Model

    Sep 30, 2026Enyi Wang, Mingxin Wang, Quan Shi +12World Models for RoboticsVisuo-Tactile Representation Learning

    Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University · Tsinghua University · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences +4

  13. Token-World: World Modeling in Vision-Language Model Token Space for Robot Manipulation

    Sep 30, 2026Chuyao Fu, Xiaowei Chi, Yuhan Rui +14World ModelsAction-Conditioned World Models

    Southern University of Science and Technology · MUKA Robotics · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology +3

  14. When Instructions Retrieve Trajectories: Diagnosing and Mitigating Generalization Failures in VLA Models

    Sep 30, 2026Hung-Jen Chen, Yu-Hsun Hou, Yan-Hong Chen +4Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

    National Tsing Hua University · National Taiwan University

  15. Magic-W0: A Structured World-Action Foundation Model for Physical Intelligence

    Sep 30, 2026Xuhua Chen, Zhenhan Yin, Yuan Zhang +15Robot Foundation ModelsAction-Conditioned World Models

    Magic-Lab Team, Magiclab Robotics Inc.

  16. Learning from Runtime Feedback through Failure-Bank Self-Evolution for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Sep 30, 2026Mingyue Cui, Zheyuan Liu, Yihan Zhu +2Continual Learning for VLA ModelsRobotic Manipulation

    University of Notre Dame

  17. Tool-Policy Co-Design for Powder Weighing in Laboratory Automation

    Sep 30, 2026Nikola Radulov, Xin Yang, Kevin S. Luck +1Robot Morphology-Control Co-DesignRobotic Tool Use

    School of Computer Science & Informatics, University of Liverpool, UK. · Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Faculty of Science, Netherlands. · Department of Chemistry, University of Liverpool, UK.

  18. Making Waves: A Membrane-Coupled Delta Array for Manipulating Objects Below the Actuator Spacing

    Sep 30, 2026Bailey Dacre, Andrés Faíña, Oliver Kroemer +1Robotic ControlRobotic Manipulation

  19. Text-to-3D Policy: Fine-Grained Language-Behavior Alignment for Unseen Specification Generalization

    Sep 30, 2026Xinhao Yang, Wenhao Wu, Ning Lv +5Language-Conditioned Robot ManipulationGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    Nanjing University · Australian National University · University of Technology Sydney

  20. Discrete Forcing: Infusing Discrete Guidance into Continuous Denoising for Few-Step Action Experts

    Sep 30, 2026Jingbo Wang, Wenxuan Song, Wenhao Yu +6Flow MatchingEfficient VLA Model Inference

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · South China University of Technology · University of Science and Technology of China +3

  21. Spike-driven Vision-Language-Action Model

    Sep 30, 2026Shuai Wang, Malu Zhang, Mingquan Liu +6Efficient VLA ModelsVision-Language-Action Models

    University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

  22. LIBERO-Agent: Evaluating General-Purpose Agents for Direct Embodied Manipulation

    Sep 30, 2026Zijie Diao, Yitong Chen, Sicheng Xie +7Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI, Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute

  23. UniWAM Technical Report: Unified Mobile Manipulation via Mixed-Stream World-Action Modeling and Manipulation Anchor Pose Supervision

    Sep 30, 2026Wei Xue, Keliang Liu, Mingzhang Cui +14Mobile ManipulationRobot Navigation

    Physical Superintelligence Lab, Fysics AI · College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University

  24. Beyond the Current Scene: Event-Referential Grasping with Active View Selection

    Sep 30, 2026Hyunjoon Lee, Haebeom Jung, Eunsung Cha +4Robotic GraspingLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

    Seoul National University · NVIDIA

  25. MotionWeave: Learning Motion-Centered Future Dynamics for Vision-Language-Action Policies

    Sep 30, 2026Jingqiu Wang, Yan WangVisuomotor Policy LearningRobotic Manipulation

    School of Data Science and Engineering East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

  26. HiWE: Hierarchical World Knowledge Model with Visual Keypoint Enhancement for Zero-Shot 3D Path Planning

    Sep 30, 2026Guoqing Ma, Mingqi Yuan, Chen Gao +2Zero-Shot Robotic ManipulationLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

    Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · State Key Laboratory of Brain Cognition and Brain-inspired Intelligence Technology, CAS +2

  27. A Biophysically Detailed C. elegans Circuit as a Task-Agnostic Dynamical Core for Visually Robust Robot Manipulation

    Sep 30, 2026Linrui Qian, Jiajia Zhang, Gan He +7Robotic ControlRobot Policy Learning

    CogLeap.AI Space Intelligence (Wuxi) Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing 100080, China · School of Mathematics and Computational Science, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan 411105, China · Institute for Brain and Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China. +1

  28. The Planning Limits of Latent World Models

    Sep 30, 2026Ali Alrasheed, Basim Azam, Naveed AkhtarWorld Model-Based PlanningAction-Conditioned World Models

    The University of Melbourne, Australia

  29. Exploiting Vulnerabilities: Universal Adversarial Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models in Robotics

    Sep 30, 2026Songhua Yang, Ziyu Liu, Yuanwei Liu +5Adversarial Attacks on VLA ModelsRobotic Manipulation

    School of Computer Science, Wuhan University. · School of Robotics, Wuhan University. · School of Power and Mechanical Engineering, Wuhan University.

  30. Make Code as Policy Great Again: Frontier Agents Write, Call, and Evolve Robot Tools

    Sep 30, 2026Shijia Ge, Alex Zhou, Jianshu Zeng +12Robotic Tool UseTool-Using Agents

    Hexafuture Inc. · Peking University · Beijing Institute of Technology +1