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. Addressing the Orchestration Gap in Generalist Robots via Physical Agency

    Jul 23, 2026Liane Galanti, Dhruv Shah, Tri DaoRobotic ManipulationRobot Task Planning

    1Princeton University · 2Together AI

  2. FORGE-plus: Force-Budgeted Recovery for Contact-Rich Assembly with a Frozen LLM Supervisor

    Jul 23, 2026Kyupaeck Jeff Rah, Midum OhReinforcement LearningLanguage Model-Based Control

    Independent Researcher

  3. GuidedAttention: Interpretable and Correctable Visual Attention for OOD-Robust Robot Manipulation via Imitation Learning

    Jul 23, 2026Masaki Murooka, Ryoichi Nakajo, Keisuke Shirai +4Visual AttentionRobot Skill Learning

    CNRS-AIST JRL (Joint Robotics Laboratory), IRL, 1-1-1 Umezono, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8560, Japan · Artificial Intelligence Research Center, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), 2-3-26 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0064, Japan

  4. URF: A Unified Robot Control-Policy Framework for Stable Contact Aware Manipulation

    Jul 23, 2026Jiyou Shin, Youngjin Seo, Jaeseog Won +5Robotic ControlContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    The authors are with the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 2066, South Korea · The authors are with the Faculty of Intelligent Robotics, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 2066, South Korea

  5. A real-time RGB-D perception pipeline for autonomous impact hammers in mining: self-filtering, rock segmentation and rock-breaking poses generation

    Jul 22, 2026Martín Gallegos, Francisco Leiva, Patricio Loncomilla +2RoboticsRobotic Manipulation

    Advanced Mining Technology Center (AMTC) and Department of Electrical Engineering, Universidad de Chile, Tupper 2007, Santiago, Chile.

  6. Scalable Low-Cost Laboratory Automation: A Digital Twin-Integrated Robotic Platform for Autonomous Liquid Handling (RAINBOT)

    Jul 22, 2026Mohamed Rami Ayeche, Souhil Sid, Ahyen Mostofa +3Laboratory AutomationRobotic Manipulation

    Acceleration Consortium, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. · AISCIA Informatics, Qatar Science and Technology Park, Doha, Qatar · Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Education City, Doha, Qatar.

  7. Closing the Lab-to-Store Gap: A Data-Efficient Post-Training and Experience-Driven Learning VLA Framework for Retail Humanoids

    Jul 22, 2026Roger Sala Sisó, Tiago Silvério, Jakob Sand +1Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

    HIVE Robots, Denmark · Department of Engineering Technology, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark

  8. Robots Acquire Manipulation Skills in Seconds from a Single Human Video

    Jul 22, 2026Guangyan Chen, Meiling Wang, Te Cui +9Robot LearningRobot Skill Learning

    Beijing Institute of Technology · X SQUARE ROBOT · Tsinghua University

  9. V2F: Vision-Informed Grasp Force Prediction for Damage-Aware Robotic Handling of Date Fruits

    Jul 22, 2026Shahd Shami, Obadah Wali, Eric Feron +1Robotic GraspingRobotic Manipulation

    Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal 23955, Saudi Arabia

  10. LENS: LLM-guided Environment Simplification for Planning and Control in Clutter

    Jul 22, 2026Aileen Liao, Rachel Holladay, Dinesh Jayaraman +1Robotic ManipulationRobot Task Planning

    University of Pennsylvania

  11. Masked Visual Actions for Unified World Modeling

    Jul 21, 2026Hadi Alzayer, Wenlong Huang, Haonan Chen +8Action-Conditioned Video GenerationRobotic Manipulation

    Stanford University · University of Maryland, College Park · Harvard University

  12. RoboInter1.5: A Holistic Intermediate Representation Suite for Embodied World Modeling and Robotic Manipulation

    Jul 21, 2026Ziqin Wang, Hao Li, Weijun Wang +5RoboticsRobotic Manipulation

  13. FM-VLA: Force-based Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models in Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Jul 20, 2026Ruicheng Li, Qixiu Li, Ruichun Ma +8Memory-Augmented VLMsLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

    Tsinghua University · Microsoft Research · Fudan University +1

  14. RynnBrain 1.1: Towards More Capable and Generalizable Embodied Foundation Model

    Jul 20, 2026Kehan Li, Bohan Hou, Minghao Zhu +283D Visual GroundingCross-Embodiment Robot Learning

    1DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group

  15. SAGE: Subgoal-Conditioned Action Generation for Latent World Model Planning

    Jul 20, 2026Letian Cheng, Qi Zhang, Yisen WangLong-Horizon PlanningLatent World Models

    Peking University

  16. MEVION: Low-Cost Open-Source Data Collection System for Powerful and High-Speed Dual-Arm Manipulation

    Jul 20, 2026Kento Kawaharazuka, Yoshiki Obinata, Hirokazu Ishida +6Bimanual Robotic ManipulationRobotic Data Collection

    Department of Mechano-Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-8656, Japan

  17. ConceptTree: Bringing Semantic Transparency to Black-Box Decision Making for Robotic Manipulation

    Jul 20, 2026Yongyan Wen, Feifan Liu, Jinyi Chen +3Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    1Harbin Institute of Technology · 2Nanyang Technological University

  18. Seg2Grasp: A Robust Modular Suction Grasping in Bin Picking

    Jul 20, 2026Hye-Jung Yoon, Juno Kim, Yesol Park +2Robotic GraspingRobotic Manipulation

    1Interdisciplinary Program in AI, Seoul National University · 2Artificial Intelligence Institute, Seoul National University · Department of Computer Science, Seoul National University

  19. HCPG-Flow:Hierarchical Contact-Progress Guidance for Flow-Policy Robot Manipulation

    Jul 20, 2026Guanghu Xie, Mingxu Li, Shuo Zhang +5Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobotic RL

    State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, Heilongjiang, China

  20. From Perception to Assistance: Open-Vocabulary Shared Autonomy for Robotic Manipulation

    Jul 19, 2026Murilo Vinicius da Silva, Ricardo V. Godoy, Juliano Negri +3Language-Conditioned Robot ManipulationRobot Teleoperation

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of São Paulo, São Carlos, Brazil · Instituto Israelita de Ensino e Pesquisa Albert Einstein, Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, São Paulo, Brazil · Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.

  21. Asynchronous Multimodal Diffusion Policy Composition via Latency-Aware Guidance Fusion

    Jul 19, 2026Zihao He, Hongjie Fang, Shirun Tang +2Diffusion GuidanceDiffusion Policy

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Noematrix · Shanghai Innovation Institute +1

  22. BoxTwin: Learning Elastoplastic Articulated Object Dynamics from Videos

    Jul 19, 2026Heng Zhang, Gehan Zheng, Kaifeng Zhang +6Articulated Object ReconstructionDeformable Object Manipulation

    Heng Zhang, Gehan Zheng, Kaifeng Zhang, Jay Song, Shivansh Patel, Sonny Hu, Yunzhu Li and Changxi Zheng are with SceniX, Inc. · Peter Yichen Chen is with the University of British Columbia.

  23. PREFAIL: Identifying Precursors to Failures in Robotic Lift-and-Place Tasks to Improve Task Execution Performance

    Jul 18, 2026Zeyu Shangguan, Rajas Chitale, Rutvik Patel +2Non-Prehensile ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, USA.

  24. Let the Body Follow: Coupled Egocentric Control for Whole-Body Robot Teleoperation

    Jul 17, 2026Tsung-Chi Lin, Yichen Xie, Chien-Ming HuangRobot TeleoperationWhole-Body Robotic Manipulation

    Department of Computer Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA. · Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.

  25. Dynamics-Aware Meta-Imitation for Generalization to Unseen Robotic Manipulation

    Jul 17, 2026Zhenduo Shang, Xiyao Liu, Bohan Li +4Robot Skill LearningGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China · Shenyang University of Technology

  26. AC-VLA: Robust Out-of-Distribution Action Execution via Compositional Learning

    Jul 17, 2026Xiaojiang Peng, Kai Peng, Jie Lu +3Robot Skill LearningGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    Shenzhen Technology University · Tongji University · Great Bay University +1

  27. IMBench: A Benchmark for Intuitive Robotic Manipulation

    Jul 17, 2026Anurag Maurya, Sukhvansh Jain, Prajwal Avhad +9Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Manav Robotics, Bengaluru, India

  28. AEGIS: Assay-Aware Protocol Validation and Runtime Monitoring for Open-Source Liquid Handling Robots

    Jul 17, 2026Priyanka V. Setty, Arvind Ramanathan, Ian Foster +1Robotic Anomaly DetectionLaboratory Automation

    a Data Science and Learning Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL 60439, USA. · b Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.

  29. AHEAD: Anticipatory Hand-Driven Teleoperation via Human Intent Prediction

    Jul 16, 2026Seok Joon Kim, Junho Lee, Federica Spinola +2Robot TeleoperationIntent Classification

    Georgia Institute of Technology. · Neuromeka Ltd. · INRIA. +1

  30. Towards Human-like Physical Intelligence: LifelongVision-Language-Action Learning for Robotic Manipulation

    Jul 16, 2026Yao He, Gan Sun, Wenqi Liang +2Continual Robot LearningRobot Skill Learning

    South China University of Technology · University of Trento