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

CardsList

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

  1. PolyUMI: Accessible Visual-Tactile-Audio Data Collection for Object Inference and Manipulation

    Sep 24, 2026Conor W. Hayes, Rickmer Krohn, Aravind Ramaswami +6Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobotic Data Collection

  2. EgoSpeedUp: Transferring Human Manipulation Tempo to Robot Policies

    Sep 24, 2026Hanbit Oh, Yukiyasu Domae, Takuma YagiRobot Policy LearningRobotic Manipulation

  3. From Passive Execution to Active Exploration: Agentic Embodied Manipulation in Realistic Environments

    Sep 24, 2026Shilin Ma, Chubin Zhang, Xulong Bai +3Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationActive Vision for Robot Manipulation

  4. CAMP: Cooperative Arm-Hand Motion Planning in Constrained Spaces

    Sep 24, 2026Ziyuan Wang, Yunlong Shan, Fei Mo +6Constrained Motion PlanningRobot Motion Generation

  5. Outcome-Sensitive Motion Search for Impact-Aware Dexterous Catching

    Sep 24, 2026Guorui Pei, Jinsong Wu, Songyuan Su +5Robotic GraspingRobotic Manipulation

  6. CALM: Current Aligned Link Manipulation for Single Arm Oversized Object Lifting

    Sep 24, 2026Jun Hu, Sihan Chen, Kosta Jovanovic +4Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

  7. Learning from Mixed-Quality Deployment Experience for Robot Manipulation

    Sep 24, 2026Yangang Ren, Yujie Yan, Zirui Li +6Robot Policy LearningOffline RL

  8. CrossSafe: Towards Cross-Embodiment Latent Safety Filters

    Sep 24, 2026Ihab Tabbara, Yuxuan Yang, Hussein SibaiReachability AnalysisCross-Embodiment Robot Learning

  9. ActGaze: Learning Action-Grounded Gaze through Counterfactual Visual Interventions for High-Precision Manipulation

    Sep 24, 2026Jinxuan Zhu, Jiaheng Wang, Chao Tang +7Visuomotor Policy LearningRobotic Manipulation

  10. Direction-Scale Decomposition in Action Representation: Rethinking What to Tokenize for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Sep 24, 2026Yufei Duan, Hang Yin, Alberta Longhini +2Action Representation LearningRobotic Manipulation

  11. TAPESIM: Efficient Simulation of Adhesive Tape Dispensing for Robotic Manipulation

    Sep 23, 2026Zhaofeng Luo, Xinyu Lu, Jaehoon Choi +10Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobotics Simulation

  12. LiMA: Bridging Long-term Imagination to Real-time Dexterous Manipulation via Asynchronous Diffusion

    Sep 23, 2026Ning Chen, Yankai Fu, Junkai Zhao +5Robotic ControlRobotic Manipulation

  13. PointCast: One World Model for Rigid, Articulated, and Deformable Object Manipulation

    Sep 23, 2026Hantao Ye, Ross Worobel, Zhuoli Xie +4World Models for RoboticsRobotic Manipulation

  14. MemBodied: Recurrent Associative Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Sep 23, 2026Tej Deep Pala, Navonil Majumder, Bryce Goh +4Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

  15. VLMs Can Describe, But Not Measure: Object-Centric Scene Understanding for Robotic Manipulation

    Sep 23, 2026Enrico Saccon, Tommaso Faraci, Iñigo De La Ossa Zarzuelo +3Robotic ManipulationVLMs for Robotics

  16. A Modular Dual-Arm Robotic Cell for Disassembly and Repair of Industrial Control Electronics

    Sep 23, 2026Maximilian Ruhe, Fabian Harlacher, Christian Friedrich +1Industrial RoboticsRobotic Manipulation

  17. LeWAM: Latent evolving World Action Model

    Sep 23, 2026Xueji Fang, Boqiang Duan, Hua Wu +2Joint-Embedding Predictive ArchitectureAction-Conditioned World Models

  18. BEE: Intervention-Adaptive Real-World Reinforcement Learning with Vision-Language-Action Models

    Sep 23, 2026Weihui Zhao, Xiaohan Yan, Zunian Wan +14RL for VLMsRobotic Manipulation

  19. CoPRE: Improving Sensitivity in Proprioceptive Contact Detection for Low-Cost Robot Arms

    Sep 23, 2026Yuxiao Zhu, Jinzhou Li, Yifei Dong +6Robotic PerceptionRobotic Manipulation

  20. CoRe-WAM: Correspondence-Aligned Temporal Residuals for World Action Models

    Sep 23, 2026Bin Zhou, Jialong Liu, Jianan Wang +2World Action ModelsRobotic Manipulation

  21. Backdoors in Learning-Based Industrial Robotic Arm Manipulation: An Empirical Security Study

    Sep 22, 2026Zijian Zhang, Zhen Zeng, Zhongshu Gu +1Backdoor DefenseRobotic Manipulation

  22. Imperfection for Precision: Upcycling Imperfect Data for High-Precision Robotic Manipulation

    Sep 22, 2026Hao Wei, Yang Liu, Chao Tang +7Robotic ManipulationData-Efficient Robot Learning

  23. SafeLoop: Risk-Aware Rollback for Vision-Language-Action Manipulation

    Sep 22, 2026Zeyu Lou, Tianran Zhang, Xinquan Yue +2Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobot Safety

  24. RoboTwin-Phys: Do WAMs and VLAs Understand the Physical World?

    Sep 22, 2026Jiaqi Zhang, Feng Ye, Mingjia Yang +6Generalization in Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

  25. Manipulation of Deformable Linear Objects Using Model Predictive Path Integral Control with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Learning

    Sep 22, 2026Lukas Zeh, Johannes Meiwaldt, Zexu Zhou +2Deformable Object ManipulationRobot Dynamics Learning

  26. MedVLA: A Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action Framework for Closed-Loop Precision Medical Robot Manipulation

    Sep 22, 2026Junjie Xie, Angen Ye, Chuxuan He +2Robotic ControlRobotic Manipulation

  27. Fisheye-VLA: Decoupling Coverage and Acuity for Manipulation with a Single Fisheye Camera

    Sep 22, 2026Ziang Ren, Zike Yan, Raymond Zhang +2Robotic ManipulationVision-Based Robot Control