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

1,699 papers341 papers in the last four weeks, up 29% on the four weeks before. 2.0% of all new papers.

  1. Mind-VLA: Instruction-Aware Spatial Representation Alignment for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Aug 5, 2026Xingyu Ding, Yuzhong Zhao, Yang Wu +4Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

  2. Retrieve in Time, Correct in Frequency

    Aug 5, 2026Yuze Fan, Yue Cao, Pengjie Gao +7Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

  3. SSC: A Verifiable Structured Representation for Bimanual Manipulation Labelling

    Aug 5, 2026Yupu Lu, Shuang Wu, Sihan Chen +4Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationKnowledge Representation

  4. Beyond Visibility: Real-Time Surface Accessibility Fields from Sparse LiDAR

    Aug 5, 2026Bradley Scott, Sam Schofield, Richard GreenRobotic ManipulationRobotic Perception

  5. CofactVLA: Deconfounding Vision-Language-Action Models via Counterfactual Intervention

    Aug 5, 2026Yan Zhang, Yinan Wu, Haoran Duan +1Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

  6. SiMDex: Mining Similar Egocentric Videos for Cross-Embodiment Dexterous Manipulation

    Aug 4, 2026Nie Lin, Takehiko Ohkawa, Sijin Chen +10Cross-Embodiment Robot LearningRobotic Manipulation

  7. LiLa-WAM: Lightweight Latent Reasoning World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation

    Aug 4, 2026Fan Yang, Yuting Su, Xiaobo Wang +7World Models for RoboticsLatent Visual Reasoning

  8. Unified Visuomotor Targets: Supervising VLAs Beyond Physical Actions

    Aug 4, 2026Zhenyang Feng, Unnat JainLatent Action LearningVisuomotor Policy Learning

  9. Projection-Retraction MPPI: Exact Constraint-Manifold Control for Manipulators

    Aug 4, 2026Seulchan Lee, Leesai Park, Minhyeong Kang +1Robotic ControlConstrained Motion Planning

  10. Continue or Replan? Bernoulli-Continuation Policy Learning for Adaptive Horizon Execution

    Aug 4, 2026Weichen Xu, Zhenhua Liu, Lin Luo +8Efficient VLA Model InferenceRobotic Manipulation

  11. Kitchen Robotic Manipulation utilizing Foundation Models

    Aug 4, 2026Myung-Hwan Jeon, Sankalp Yamsani, Joohyung KimRobotic GraspingRobot Foundation Models

  12. A Hierarchical Approach to Imitation Learning for Manipulation Tasks Requiring Time Varying Forces

    Aug 4, 2026Rishabh Shukla, Adithya Santhosh, Shaili Gandhi +2Bimanual Robotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

  13. EmbodiedVAE: Disentangled Video VAE for Efficient and Controllable Embodied Manipulation

    Aug 4, 2026Jiayi Luo, Hanxin Zhu, Chen Gao +5Variational AutoencodersDisentangled Representation Learning

  14. Faster-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Deep Action Modules?

    Aug 3, 2026Liheng Ma, Rui Heng Yang, Amin Abyaneh +8World Model LearningEfficient Inference for World Action Models

  15. Look Where It Matters: Adaptive Visual Refinement for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Aug 3, 2026Jin Cui, Yanbin Hu, Xinyue Long +3Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

  16. Multi-View Unified Camera Fields: Geometry-Shaped Action-Facing Representations for RGB-Only Multi-Camera VLA Policies

    Aug 3, 2026Jiarui Yang, Yehao Lu, Yuning Su +9Multi-View ConsistencyRobotic Manipulation

  17. ReTouch: Empowering Contact-Rich Dexterous Manipulation with Online-Refined Tactile Prediction

    Aug 3, 2026Shiqi Zhang, Xin Zhang, Yedong Shen +9Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

  18. AffordTrajDP: Dynamic Affordance-Guided Visuomotor Policy Learning for Robotic Manipulation

    Aug 3, 2026Gaoyuan Wu, Ziyu Shan, Haoyang Du +2Visuomotor Policy LearningRobot Skill Learning

  19. SG-WAM: Self-Guided World Modeling in Geometry-Aware Policy Space

    Aug 2, 2026Ruiteng Zhao, Zhengshen Zhang, Yue Su +6World Models for RoboticsAction-Conditioned World Models

  20. Hermite Curves as Trajectory Priors for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Aug 2, 2026Qi Lv, Jianming Xing, Zhao Yang +5Robot Motion GenerationRobotic Manipulation

  21. OC-VLA++: Monocular Geometry-Guided Cross-View Consistency for Viewpoint-Robust Robotic Manipulation

    Aug 2, 2026Tianyi Zhang, Ziyang Gong, Zhenjie Yang +2Multi-View ConsistencyGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

  22. Self Supervised Learning from Automatically Generated Demonstrations for Visual Robotic Manipulation

    Aug 1, 2026Andres Rivas, Anselmo R. Cukla, Rodrigo S. Guerra +2Robotic GraspingRobot Skill Learning

  23. DynamicWAM: Dual-Path Motion Conditioning for World-Action Models in Dynamic Manipulation

    Aug 1, 2026Yunfan Lou, Hewen Gao, Xiyu Zhu +6World Models for RoboticsGoal-Conditioned Robotic Manipulation

  24. Push-Wiper: Toward General-Purpose Robotic Cleaning across Varied Stains and Surfaces with Segmented Pushing Trajectories

    Aug 1, 2026Renhao Lu, Mingxin Wang, Chenyang Cao +5Robotic ManipulationRobot Policy Generalization

  25. DreamTraj: Generating 6-DoF Object Trajectories by Reading Unrendered Video Diffusion Latents

    Aug 1, 2026Tongsheng Ding, Zhen Luo, Yixuan Yang +4Trajectory GenerationRobotic Manipulation

  26. Learning to Predict Contact Force Distributions from Vision Leveraging Object Geometry Priors

    Aug 1, 2026Ryo Hanai, Yukiyasu Domaea, Ixchel G. Ramirez-Alpizar +3Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation