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. GeoAAC: Geometry-Based Adaptive Action Chunking from Denoising Trajectories in VLA Policies

    Sep 17, 2026Xin Chen, Sen Chen, Yujuan Ding +5Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

    Tongji University · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

  2. MoWAM: Explicit Future Motion Prediction for Efficient World Action Models

    Sep 17, 2026Jiayu Wang, Bin Zhu, Yue Yu +1World Models for RoboticsWorld Model-Based Planning

    College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai, China · Singapore Management University, Singapore · Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

  3. Learning Foresight without Explicit Trajectories for 3D Diffusion Policies

    Sep 17, 2026Zhongbo Zhang, Zaibin Zhang, Yifan Wang +3Robot Policy LearningDiffusion Policy

    Dalian University of Technology

  4. DexTouch-WM: Learning Action-Conditioned Tactile World Models from Human Touch for Dexterous Robot Manipulation

    Sep 17, 2026Yan Qin, Yue Chen, Wenwei Lin +9World Models for RoboticsTactile Sensing

    HKUST (GZ) · Xspark AI · PKU +1

  5. V2-STRep: VLM-Grounded Structured Task Representations for Reusable Robot Skills Acquired from Generated Videos

    Sep 17, 2026Yexin Hu, Dongheui LeeZero-Shot Robotic ManipulationGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    Autonomous Systems Lab, Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien), Austria. · Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany.

  6. Accelerating Visual Policy Learning with Sampling-Based Model Predictive Control

    Sep 17, 2026Yilang Liu, Haoxiang You, Qian Wang +2Policy OptimizationVisuomotor Policy Learning

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA · Department of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA · School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

  7. Imagine-TAMP: Imagination-Guided Task and Motion Planning in Partial Observability

    Sep 17, 2026Antareep Singha, Shivaram Kumar, Yoonwoo Kim +1Belief-Space PlanningActive Perception

    Nanyang Technological University · The University of Texas at Austin

  8. AnyViewDex: View-Invariant Dexterous Manipulation from RGB Observations

    Sep 17, 2026Soham Patil, Om Sanjay Gunjal, Sourabh Bhosale +3Robotic GraspingZero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

    Robotics Research Center, IIIT-H, India · Department of Electronics Engineering, Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute Mumbai, India · Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal, India

  9. AnyviewMeter: Adapting Robotic Reward Models with Camera Geometry and Multi-View Attention

    Sep 17, 2026Yuang Tu, Runjia Tan, Yujie Yan +2Multi-View LearningRobotic Manipulation

    Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  10. MaskHarness-WAM: Instance-Grounded Harnessing for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation

    Sep 17, 2026Zitai Huang, Taiyi Su, Jian Zhu +6Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Tongji University · AIRC, Midea Group

  11. Execution-Aware Pre-Execution Ranking for Grasp-Conditioned Robotic Placement

    Sep 17, 2026Tianyuan Liu, Rutherford Agbeshi Patamia, Benjamin Champion +2Robotic GraspingRobotics

    Deakin University, Australia

  12. Improving Cross-embodiment Transfer in Latent Action Models with Action-Similarity Supervision

    Sep 17, 2026Maxime Alvarez, Renzo Caballero, Tatsuya Matsushima +2Latent Action LearningRobotic Manipulation

    Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo

  13. RotateIt! Fast and Reliable Single-Arm Garment Unfolding via Online-Adaptive Dynamic Rotation

    Sep 17, 2026Zeqing Zhang, Zuokun Xie, Ao Fang +4Robotic ManipulationDynamic Robotic Manipulation

    Nanyang Technological University · The University of Hong Kong · Chinese Academy of Sciences

  14. LIFD: Anchored Diffusion for 3D-Aware Scene Memory in Robotic Manipulation

    Sep 17, 2026Wenbo Li, Yiteng Chen, Wenhao Li +1Robotic Manipulation3D Scene Representation

    School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology

  15. Towards High-DoF Dexterous Manipulation through VLA Post-Training

    Sep 17, 2026Junlei Zhu, Shenzhe Yao, Chaogui Huang +6Latent Action LearningVLA Model Post-Training

    Wuji Technology · School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, China

  16. Runtime Safety Filtering for Two-Terminal Hazards in Robotic Battery Recycling

    Sep 17, 2026Yuxin Cao, Wei Song, Xianglin Yang +4Robot SafetySafety Filtering

    National University of Singapore, Singapore · Griffith University, Australia · UNSW Canberra, Australia +2

  17. TacSushi: Tactile-Grounded World-Action Modeling for Dexterous Sushi Manipulation

    Sep 17, 2026Haodi Hu, Kaen Kogashi, Toshiaki Koike-AkinoWorld Models for RoboticsContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    University of Southern California, USA · Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), USA · Mitsubishi Electric, Japan

  18. Learning Holistic Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation with a Bipedal Mobile Manipulator

    Sep 16, 2026Zhongyu Chen, Yuxuan Nai, Qian Chen +8Whole-Body Robotic ManipulationHumanoid Loco-Manipulation

    ZJU-UIUC Institute. · LimX Dynamics.

  19. CaSCo: Cascade-Aware Soft-Collision Motion Planning

    Sep 16, 2026Shivaram Kumar, Gaoyuan Liu, Yoonchang SungRoadmap-Based Motion PlanningRobot Safety

    Nanyang Technological University

  20. Asymptotically Optimal Multi-Robot Task and Motion Planning

    Sep 16, 2026Thi Thuy Ngan Duong, Cheuk Tung Shadow Yiu, Rahul Shome +1Multi-Robot Motion PlanningMulti-Robot Systems

    Nanyang Technological University · The Australian National University

  21. Calibrated Probabilistic Obstruction Reasoning with Vision-Language Models for Grasping in Clutter

    Sep 16, 2026Thanh-Tuan Tran, Ngoc-Chien Chu, Thanh Nguyen Canh +3Robotic GraspingRobotic Manipulation

    University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, 10000, Vietnam · School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Ishikawa, 923-1211, Japan · Department of Robotics, Hanyang University, Gyeonggi-do, 15588, Korea

  22. AffordanceWAM: Affordance-Aware Joint World-Action Modeling for Robot Manipulation

    Sep 16, 2026Jiadi You, Qize Yu, Yue Chen +11Affordance-Based Robotic ManipulationWorld Models for Robotics

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

  23. WeaveRL: Weaving Reconstruction into Scene-Aware Fabrics for Perceptive Reinforcement Learning

    Sep 16, 2026Remo Steiner, Vikram Ramasamy, David Tingdahl +73D ReconstructionGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    NVIDIA Corporation. Zurich, Seattle and Santa Clara.

  24. From Gameplay to Policy: Towards Scalable Robot Data Collection via Gamified Robot-Free Interaction

    Sep 16, 2026Zheng Li, Liang Zhu, Junzhe Wang +13Affordance-Based Robotic ManipulationRobot Policy Learning

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). · The University of Hong Kong. · Tsinghua University.

  25. ActiveScale: Scaling Active Perception for Robots across Model, Data, and Hardware

    Sep 16, 2026Shuai Zhou, Kaisheng Pang, Wenxuan Song +3Active Vision for Robot ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

  26. ActionPiece: Rethinking Action Tokenization for Autoregressive Vision-Language-Action Models

    Sep 16, 2026Shijie Lian, Bin Yu, Zhaolong Shen +5Vector QuantizationRobotic Manipulation

    Huazhong University of Science and Technology · Zhongguancun Academy · DeepCybo +5

  27. WetRobo: A Reproducible Robot Kit for Coding Agents in Biological Laboratories

    Sep 16, 2026Yuna Oikawa, Kei Endo, Takanori Uzawa +5Robot Policy AdaptationCode Generation for Robotics

    Department of Computational Biology and Medical Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan · RIKEN Pioneering Research Institute, Japan · New York University, USA +3

  28. DetAug: Obstacle-Blind Trajectory Augmentation for Zero-shot Obstacle Avoidance

    Sep 16, 2026Reece O'Mahoney, Moritz Zoellner, Ioannis HavoutisRobot Policy LearningTrajectory Generation

    Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK · Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

  29. DistAL: Distance-based Advantage Learning for VLA Fine-Tuning

    Sep 16, 2026Reece O'Mahoney, Ioannis HavoutisReinforcement LearningReward Shaping

    Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford, UK

  30. Decoupling Vision, Language, and Action for Efficient Multi-Task Robot Policies

    Sep 16, 2026Xiatao Sun, Chen Liang, Ziyao Zeng +5Visuomotor Policy LearningEfficient VLA Models

    Department of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. · Peking University, Beijing, China. · Digients, Singapore.