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. KineFuse: Kinematic-Aware Haptic Fusion for In-Hand Occluded-Object Pose Tracking

    Jul 16, 2026Chanyoung Ahn, Jaesung Lee, Sungwoo Park +1Object Pose EstimationRobotic Manipulation

    Center for Humanoid Research, KIST, Seoul, 02792 South Korea · Korea University, Seoul, 02841 South Korea

  2. Beyond Implicit Force: Evaluating Explicit Force-Torque Proxies in Action Chunking with Transformers

    Jul 16, 2026King Hang Wong, Lingqiao Liu, Feras DayoubContact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML), Adelaide University, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia

  3. Active Real-World Factor-Based Evaluation for Generalist Robot Policies

    Jul 16, 2026Andrew Liao, Hanchen Cui, Karthik Desingh +1Robotic Policy EvaluationSequential Experimental Design

    University of Minnesota Twin Cities

  4. Learning Forward & Reverse Skills from a Single Unfinished Demonstration for Constrained Manipulation Tasks

    Jul 15, 2026Yexin Hu, Haoyi Zheng, Johannes Heidersberger +1Robot Skill LearningContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

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

  5. Learning Robust Execution in Robotic Manipulation with Agentic Reinforcement Learning

    Jul 15, 2026Xiaopeng Zhang, Yueyang Weng, Qi Liu +2Agentic RLRobot Failure Recovery

    School of Inteligence Science and Engineering, the Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen, 518055, China. · Faculty of Robot Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, 110819, China.

  6. Vision-Based Obstacle Separation for Strawberry Harvesting in Clusters Using Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

    Jul 15, 2026Teng Li, Hanfei Shi, Chunjiang Zhao +1Robotic GraspingHierarchical RL

    The Intelligent Equipment Research Center, Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Beijing 100097, China. · School of Intelligence Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China. · Happy Elements Ltd., Beijing 100094, China.

  7. Towards a Modular Bin-picking Framework for Handling Object Pose Uncertainties

    Jul 15, 2026Frederik HagelskjærRobotic GraspingObject Pose Estimation

    SDU Robotics The Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Institute University of Southern Denmark Odense, Denmark

  8. Anatomy of Uncertainty: Expressive Descriptors of Robotic Manipulator Motion for Non-verbal Communication in Human-Robot Collaboration

    Jul 15, 2026Ridhima Bector, Souravik Dutta, Poornima Ramachandran +4Robot Motion GenerationHuman-Robot Collaboration

    School Of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, 81 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637458 · School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Ave, Block N3, Nanyang Avenue, 639798

  9. VAMP-MR: Vector-Accelerated Motion Planning and Execution for Multi-Robot-Arms

    Jul 15, 2026Philip Huang, Chenrui Gao, Jiaoyang LiMulti-Robot Motion PlanningRobotic Manipulation

    Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA · University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

  10. Reverse to Advance: Teleoperation-Cost Effective Hard Policy Learning from Reversed Easy Tasks

    Jul 15, 2026Qiyuan Qiao, Ge Yuan, Can Wang +1Robot TeleoperationRobotic Manipulation

    The University of Hong Kong

  11. DenseReward: Dense Reward Learning via Failure Synthesis for Robotic Manipulation

    Jul 14, 2026Yu Fang, Wanxi Dong, Jiaqi Liu +7RL for RoboticsReward Modeling

    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · Carnegie Mellon University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +1

  12. FlowWAM: Optical Flow as a Unified Action Representation for World Action Models

    Jul 14, 2026Yixiang Chen, Peiyan Li, Yuan Xu +13Action-Conditioned Video GenerationVideo Diffusion Models

    New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · MBZUAI +2

  13. ExToken: Structured Exploration for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Reinforcement Fine-tuning

    Jul 14, 2026Yilun Kong, Yunpeng Qing, Guozheng Ma +4RL ExplorationRobotic Manipulation

    Nanyang Technological University · ACE Robotics · Zhejiang University +1

  14. Reducing Temporal Redundancy for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Inference

    Jul 14, 2026Yuzhou Wu, Yuxin Zheng, Muchun Niu +6Efficient VLA Model InferenceEfficient VLA Models

    1Tianji KernalMind co ltd · 2Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, China · 3Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China +2

  15. More than a Manipulator: Planning Propellant-Free Attitude Maneuvers for Free-Floating Spacecraft

    Jul 13, 2026Harsh G. Bhundiya, Avi Soval, Keenan AlbeeSpacecraft Attitude DeterminationSpace Robotics

    Department of Astronautical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 · Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 · Departments of Astronautical, Aerospace and Mechanical, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089

  16. A Minimalist Retargeting-Guided Reinforcement Learning Recipe for Dexterous Manipulation

    Jul 13, 2026Yunhai Feng, Natalie Leung, Jiaxuan Wang +3Robot Skill LearningContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Cornell University · Amazon FAR

  17. A Compact Top-Loading Robot for Endovascular Interventions: Design, Control and Evaluation

    Jul 13, 2026Jonas Fischer, Lennart Karstensen, Franziska Mathis-UllrichRobotic Endovascular InterventionRobotic Manipulation

    Laboratory for Surgical Planning and Robot Cognition (SPARC), Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Nürnberger Straße 74, Erlangen, 91052, Bavaria, Germany.

  18. See like a Robot: Robot-Centric Pointmaps for VLA Models

    Jul 13, 2026Byungkun Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Dongjin Kim +4Visuomotor Policy LearningRobotic Manipulation

    KAIST AI · Holiday Robotics

  19. EDAR: Learning Environment-Dependent Action Representations for Robotic Manipulation

    Jul 13, 2026Yuecheng Xu, Tong Yang, Jingkai Jia +3Latent Action LearningRobot Policy Learning

    College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University · Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University · TeleAI, China Telecom

  20. Pix2Act: Image-Space Manipulation Policies with Equivariant Augmentation

    Jul 13, 2026Haojie Huang, Linfeng Zhao, Haotian Liu +9Visuomotor Policy LearningRobotic Manipulation

    1Northeastern University · 2Stanford University · University of Pennsylvania +2

  21. VIA: Visual Interface Agent for Robot Control

    Jul 13, 2026Hengyuan Hu, Jensen Gao, Priya Sundaresan +3Robotic ControlZero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

    Stanford University

  22. Affordance-Based Manipulation Planning with Text Goals and Sim-to-Real Generalisation via Real-to-Sim Image Conversion

    Jul 13, 2026Solvi Arnold, Rin Karashima, Tadashi Adachi +2Affordance-Based Robotic ManipulationWorld Models for Robotics

    SA is at NICT, Japan. Work performed while at Shinshu University, Japan. · Work performed while at Shinshu University, Japan. · RK, TA, TM are at EPSON Avasys, Japan. +1

  23. A Single Diffusion-Policy Controller for Multi-Task Block Pushing with Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Transfer

    Jul 12, 2026Haitong Ma, Haldun Balim, Yang Hu +2Sim-to-Real TransferDiffusion Policy

    1Harvard University. · 2Georgia Institute of Technology.

  24. Action Map Policy: Learning 3D Closed-loop Manipulation via Pixel Classification

    Jul 12, 2026Haojie Huang, Zhang Ye, Linfeng Zhao +7Robot Skill LearningVisuomotor Policy Learning

    Northeastern University · Stanford University · Brown University

  25. Task Planning for Mobile Manipulation in Retail Stores using Foundation Models with Iterative Re-planning

    Jul 10, 2026Vismay Vakharia, Sanjana Garai, Rolif Lima +3Large Language Model-Based Robot PlanningRobotics

    TCS Research, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Bengaluru - 560066, Karnataka, India.

  26. Robo-ValueRL: Reliable Value Estimation for Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning

    Jul 10, 2026Wenke Xia, Pei Ren, Wenbo Yu +10Value Function EstimationRobotic Manipulation

    1Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China · 2Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics · 3Beijing Forestry University +4

  27. B-spline Policy: Accelerating Manipulation Policies via B-spline Action Representations

    Jul 10, 2026Xiaoshen Han, Haoyu Xiong, Haonan Chen +4Robot Policy LearningRobotic Manipulation

    1Harvard · 2MIT · 3UT Austin

  28. Task-Adaptive Design of Modular Aerial Manipulators Under Airflow Exposure Constraints

    Jul 10, 2026Mengguang Li, Heinz KoepplRoboticsRobotic Manipulation

    Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Technische Universität Darmstadt, 64287 Darmstadt, Germany

  29. DemoBridge: A Simulation-in-the-Loop Toolkit for Single-View Human Demonstration Retargeting

    Jul 10, 2026Zehao Wang, Fabien Despinoy, Sergey Zakharov +2Robotics SimulationMotion Retargeting

    §KU Leuven · †Toyota Motor Europe · ‡Toyota Research Institute

  30. One-Shot Multimodal Learning from Demonstration with Force-Constrained Elastic Maps

    Jul 10, 2026Brendan Hertel, Jonathan Spanos, Navya Garg +1Robot Skill LearningRobotic Manipulation

    Persistent Autonomy and Robot Learning (PeARL) Lab, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA 01854, USA.