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

  1. Balancing of Humanoid with Object Mass: Trade-off Analyses and Lifting Control

    Jul 31, 2026Hyunjong Song, William Z. Peng, Joo H. KimHumanoid Loco-ManipulationHumanoid Robot Control

    Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, New York University (NYU), New York, USA · NYU Center for Robotics and Embodied Intelligence (CREO), New York, USA · NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), New York, USA

  2. Automated Straight-line Sewing of Stretchable Fabrics with Different Lengths

    Jul 31, 2026Bingchen Jin, Akinari Kobayashi, Dipankar Bhattacharya +4Deformable Object ManipulationRobotics

    JC STEM Lab of Robotics for Soft Materials, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Centre for Transformative Garment Production, Hong Kong Science Park, Hong Kong SAR, China · Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

  3. ActFovea: Runtime Safeguarding for VLA Policies via Spatiotemporal Visual-Action Consistency

    Jul 31, 2026Wenda Yu, Tianshi Wang, Fengling Li +3Robot SafetyRobotic Manipulation

    Tongji University · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory +1

  4. SemAnCorr: Semantic Anchored Correspondence for Zero-Shot Manipulation Skill Transfer

    Jul 30, 2026Xiaoxiang Dong, William Baron, Hongyi Chen +3Semantic CorrespondenceZero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

    Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA. · College of Connected Computing, Vanderbilt University, USA. · College of Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, USA. +1

  5. TurboVLA: Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Model at 32 Hz on an RTX 4090 with <1 GB VRAM

    Jul 29, 2026Hengyi Xie, Chenfei Yao, Xianjin Wu +4Efficient VLA Model InferenceEfficient VLA Models

    Huazhong University of Science and Technology

  6. SymmGrid: Super-Scaling On-Robot Learning with Parallelized Symmetries and Egocentric-Exocentric Visual Perception

    Jul 29, 2026Gabe Everett, Brice Gunter, Ryan Vander Stelt +3Data AugmentationVisuomotor Policy Learning

  7. From Passive Video to Editable Experience: Physically Grounded Experience Synthesis for Embodied Intelligence

    Jul 29, 2026Jia LuoSynthetic Data Generation for RoboticsRobotic Manipulation

    Huazhong University of Science and Technology

  8. Practice Makes Policies: Bootstrapping and Consolidating Robotic Capabilities from Zero Human Demonstrations

    Jul 29, 2026Jialiang Li, Yuhan Wang, Haojun Li +5Continual Robot LearningRobotic Data Collection

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · University of Sussex

  9. Explicit Kinematic Guidance from Analytic Concepts for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jul 29, 2026Mingyang Sun, Jiude Wei, Xiujian Liang +4Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

    Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai, China · Westlake University, Hangzhou, China +2

  10. It's Not Just More Demos: Counterfactual Action Sensitivity Coverage for Data-Efficient Robust Robot Imitation

    Jul 29, 2026Giovanni D'urso, Kaushik Roy, Nicholas Lawrance +1Visuomotor Policy LearningImitation Learning

    CSIRO Robotics, CSIRO, Australia

  11. Reeling It In: Flexible Needle Pick Up via Thread Manipulation for Autonomous Suturing

    Jul 28, 2026Emma Huang, Zih-Yun Chiu, Neelay Joglekar +2Robotic GraspingRobotic Manipulation

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA. · Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218 USA. · CMU Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA. +1

  12. MoMo: Dial Motion Mode in Robot Manipulation with Spatiotemporal Action Tokenization

    Jul 28, 2026Yuhan Hu, Hugues Thomas, Peide Huang +3Robot Skill LearningGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    Apple

  13. πR2π\mathbf{R}^2: Reactive Real-time Flow Policies

    Jul 28, 2026Sungjae Park, Shubham TulsianiRobotic ControlReal-Time Robot Control

    Carnegie Mellon University

  14. S2A2: Audio-Visual Imitation Learning for Manipulation Tasks Using Acoustic Spatial Information

    Jul 28, 2026Kaneyoshi Hiratsuka, Benjamin Yen, Ryosuke KojimaImitation LearningRobotic Manipulation

    Kyoto University · RIKEN, Institute of Science Tokyo · Kyoto University, RIKEN

  15. DC-WAM: Dynamic-Centric Visual Supervision and Reasoning for World-Action Models

    Jul 28, 2026Haoyuan Ji, Lingxiang Fan, Shang Su +4World Models for RoboticsVisuomotor Policy Learning

    Tsinghua University · Dense-AI · University of Michigan

  16. Transformer Transformer: A Unified Model for Motion-Conditioned Robot Co-design

    Jul 28, 2026Huy Ha, C. Karen Liu, Shuran SongRobot Morphology-Control Co-DesignDiffusion Transformer

    Stanford University · Columbia University

  17. Tri-Manual Visuomotor Imitation Learning of Robot Policies

    Jul 28, 2026James Zhao, Mingyuan Ba, Weiming ZhiRobot TeleoperationVisuomotor Policy Learning

    School of Computer Science and 2Australian Center For Robotics, The University of Sydney, Australia · College of Connected Computing, Vanderbilt University, TN, USA

  18. When Does Legacy Data Start to Help? Emergent Transfer in Cross-Configuration Robot Learning

    Jul 28, 2026Tao Wang, Hudson Hou, Yingdong Hu +7Robot Skill LearningRobotic Data Collection

    Huazhong University of Science and Technology · Spirit AI · Peking University +3

  19. A Causality-aware Infer-diagnose-refine Framework for Test-time Modality Adaptation in VLA Models

    Jul 28, 2026Haoyu Zhang, Yuwei Wu, Jin Chen +6Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

    1Beijing Institute of Technology · 2AInnovation Co. Ltd. · 3Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics

  20. Decompose and Reorganize: Planning with Primitives and Visuomotor Policies Learned from Demonstrations

    Jul 28, 2026Yizhou Chen, Hang Xu, Dongjie Yu +7Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobot Skill Learning

    The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong · JD.com (JingDong) · Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore +3

  21. Data Pyramid for Embodied Manipulation: A Survey

    Jul 27, 2026Yifan Ye, Yankai Fu, Yaoxu Lv +26Robotic Data CollectionRobot Foundation Models

    PKU · NTU · HKUST +8

  22. NEO: NeRF It Once, Edit It Many Times for Continuous Object Manipulation

    Jul 27, 2026Mikołaj Zieliński, David Hall, Dominik Belter +13D Scene EditingRobotic Manipulation

    Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence, Poznan University of Technology, 61-131 Pozna´n, Poland · CSIRO Robotics, CSIRO, Australia

  23. PAC-DP: PAC-Bayesian Diffusion Policy Learning

    Jul 27, 2026Mohammad Hasan Yeganegi, Dian Yu, Andrea Del Prete +2PAC-Bayesian Generalization BoundsRobot Policy Learning

    Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Trento, Italy. · Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany.

  24. WorldDiT: A Unified Diffusion Architecture for World and Action Modeling

    Jul 27, 2026Sen Wang, R. Gnana Praveen, Bidhan Roy +1Diffusion TransformerDiffusion Policy

    Bagel Labs (bagel.com)

  25. Try Once, Then Optimal: De-Redundified Procedure Memory for Cross-Episode Exploration Amortization

    Jul 26, 2026Haizhou Ge, Haochen Ouyang, Zhixing Chen +6RL ExplorationRobotic Manipulation

    1Tsinghua University. · 3Northeast Agricultural University. · 2DISCOVER Robotics.

  26. LEACL: LLM-Enhanced Automatic Curriculum Learning for Reinforcement Learning in Long-Horizon Manipulation Tasks

    Jul 26, 2026Faraz Heravi, James Ouyang, Zifan Xu +3LLM-Guided RLRobotic Manipulation

    The University of Texas at Austin · Nanyang Technological University · Sony AI

  27. The Curse of Precision: A Data Scaling Law for High-Precision Robotic Manipulation

    Jul 25, 2026Cuijie Xu, Yuanfan Xu, Min Xue +5Robotic ManipulationRobot Imitation Learning

    Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. · OpenMind (WuHu) Robotics Co., Ltd., Wuhu, China. · Institute for Embodied Intelligence and Robotics, Tsinghua University.

  28. MEMENTO: Memory-Guided Memetic Code-as-Policy Evolution

    Jul 24, 2026Alkis Sygkounas, Victor Aregbede, Amy Loutfi +1Metaheuristic OptimizationLarge Language Model-Guided Optimization

    Center for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems (AASS), Örebro University, Sweden · Örebro University, 70281 Örebro, Sweden · Linköing University, 58183 Linköping, Sweden

  29. Robot-Factored World Models via Robot Rendering

    Jul 24, 2026Byungjun Kim, Taeksoo Kim, Hyunsoo Cha +1Action-Conditioned World ModelsCross-Embodiment Robot Learning

    Seoul National University · RLWRLD

  30. Impedance Control of Ship-Borne Manipulators via Optimization-based Task-Space Inverse Dynamics

    Jul 24, 2026Lingxiao Meng, Bi-Ke Zhu, Xuheng Gao +5Robot Trajectory TrackingContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation