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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1,685 papers341 papers in the last four weeks, up 29% on the four weeks before. 2.0% of all new papers.

  1. Distortion-Resilient Robotic Imitation Learning for Autonomous Cable Routing

    Jun 10, 2026Hao Wang, Fu-Zhao Ou, Shiqi Wang +2Imitation LearningRobotic Manipulation

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, Heilongjiang 150001, China · Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR 999077, China · Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518055, China +1

  2. PLUME: Probabilistic Latent Unified World Modeling and Parameter Estimation for Multi-Finger Manipulation

    Jun 9, 2026Abhinav Kumar, Soshi Iba, Rana Soltani Zarrin +1Online System IdentificationDexterous Manipulation

    University of Michigan · Honda Research Institute USA

  3. LIBERO-Occ: Evaluating and Improving Vision-Language-Action Models under Scene-Induced Occlusion via Viewpoint Imagination

    Jun 9, 2026Taishan Li, Jiwen Zhang, Siyuan Wang +2VLM RobustnessRobotic Manipulation

    Fudan University, Shanghai, China · Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China · Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai, China

  4. IMPACT: Learning Internal-Model Predictive Control for Forceful Robotic Manipulation

    Jun 9, 2026Jiawei Gao, Chaoqi Liu, Peilin Wu +2Robotic ControlContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Harvard University · Stanford University

  5. Bridging Semantics and Physical Execution: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Multi-Pair Robotic Assembly

    Jun 9, 2026Xinyi Li, Aiguo Song, Linhu Wei +1Large Language Model-Based Robot PlanningRobotic Manipulation

    School of Instrument Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China.

  6. ManiSplat: Manipulation Trajectory Synthesis from Monocular Video via Decoupled 3D Gaussian Splatting

    Jun 9, 2026Wenhao Hu, Haonan Zhou, Liu Liu +53D Gaussian SplattingMonocular 3D Reconstruction

    1Zhejiang University · 2Horizon Robotics

  7. Dexterous Point Policy: Learning Point-based Dexterous Hand Policies from Human Demonstrations

    Jun 9, 2026Beomjun Kim, Seong Hyeon Park, Seunghoon Sim +3Dexterous ManipulationCross-Embodiment Robot Learning

    KAIST

  8. VeriSpace: Spatially Grounded Action Verification for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jun 9, 2026Guiyu Zhao, Longteng Guo, Junyou Zhu +6Visual Spatial ReasoningRobotic Manipulation

    Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

  9. UMI-Bench 1.0: An Open and Reproducible Real-World Benchmark for Tabletop Robotic Manipulation with UMI Data

    Jun 9, 2026Shi Jin, Yuntian Wang, Yuhui Duan +16Generalization in Robotic ManipulationRobotic Policy Evaluation

    Soochow University · Lumos Robotics · Fudan University +5

  10. What Matters in Orchestrating Robot Policies: A Systematic Study of Hierarchical VLA Agents

    Jun 9, 2026Jiaheng Hu, Mohit Shridhar, Caden Lu +4Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationLarge Language Model-Based Robot Planning

    Google DeepMind

  11. Efficient-WAM: A 1B-Parameter World-Action Model with Low-Cost Future Imagination

    Jun 8, 2026Jiajun Li, Tiecheng Guo, Yifan Ye +9World Models for RoboticsEfficient Inference for World Action Models

    1The University of Hong Kong · 2Peking University · 3Muka Robotics +2

  12. Robotic Nonprehensile Object Transportation with a Hanging Tray

    Jun 8, 2026Adam Heins, Angela P. SchoelligNon-Prehensile ManipulationMobile Robotics

    University of Toronto · Toronto, Canada · Technical University of Munich +1

  13. GHOST: Hierarchical Sub-Goal Policies for Generalizing Robot Manipulation

    Jun 8, 2026Sriram Krishna, Ben Eisner, Haotian Zhan +5Robot Policy LearningRobot Skill Learning

    Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University · UMass Amherst

  14. iMaC: Translating Actions into Motion and Contact Images for Embodied World Models

    Jun 8, 2026Zhenyu Wu, Xiuwei Xu, Yukun Zhou +8Representation LearningCross-Embodiment Robot Learning

    Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Tsinghua University · GigaAI +1

  15. ProbeAct: Probe-Guided Training-Free Failure Recovery in Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jun 8, 2026Fan Zhang, Seongbin Park, Baharan Mirzasoleiman +2VLM RobustnessRobot Failure Recovery

    University of California Los Angeles United States

  16. DexPIE: Stable Dexterous Policy Improvement from Real-World Experience

    Jun 8, 2026Ruizhe Liao, Wenrui Chen, Liangji Zeng +4Robot Policy LearningRobotic Manipulation

    Hunan University

  17. ReGIL: Retrieval-Guided Imitation Learning from a Single Demonstration

    Jun 8, 2026Yuying Zhang, Francesco Verdoja, Wenyan Yang +1Robot Skill LearningRobotic RL

    School of Electrical Engineering Aalto University, Finland

  18. VAIC: Vision-Guided Humanoid Agile Object Interaction Control via Decoupled Commands

    Jun 8, 2026Dongting Li, Qianyang Wu, Xingyu Chen +9Humanoid Robot ControlRobotic Manipulation

    Tsinghua University · Xiaomi Robotics Lab · HKUST(Guangzhou)

  19. Back to the Familiar Future: Failure Recovery for VLA Policies via Pre-Imagined Milestone Selection

    Jun 8, 2026Suyeon Shin, Juwon Kim, Hyeonbin Park +4Robot Failure RecoveryRobotic Manipulation

    Seoul National University · Yonsei University · Soongsil University

  20. Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

    Jun 7, 2026Yi Yu, Xinchuan QiuRobot Policy LearningRobotic Manipulation

    Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Hiroshima University, Higashi-Hiroshima, Japan

  21. Video2Sim2Real: Full-Stack Autonomous Dexterous Skill Acquisition from a Single Human Video

    Jun 7, 2026Yunhai Han, Jianuo Qiu, Linhao Bai +14Robot Skill LearningSim-to-Real Transfer

    1Georgia Institute of Technology · University of Pennsylvania · 3Toyota Research Institute +1

  22. RGB-S: Image-Aligned Tactile Saliency for Robust Dexterous Manipulation

    Jun 7, 2026Shengcheng Luo, Kefei Wu, Xiaoying Zhou +3Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationVisuo-Tactile Representation Learning

    ShanghaiTech University · Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence

  23. Guided Discovery of New Behaviors using Diffusion Policies

    Jun 7, 2026Dian Yu, Sebastian Sanokowski, Majid KhadivDiffusion GuidanceDiffusion Policy

    Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence, Technical University of Munich

  24. Latent Diffusion Policy: Shaping Latent Spaces for Diffusion-Based Robotic Manipulation

    Jun 7, 2026Zhexuan Zhou, Yichen Lai, Jinhao Zhang +3Visuomotor Policy LearningDiffusion Policy

  25. FAWAM: Force-Aware World Action Models for Closed-Loop Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Jun 7, 2026Haotian He, Zeyu Yan, Qipeng Liu +2Robotic ControlWorld Models for Robotics

    School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University · School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

  26. When Video Misreads: Closed-Loop Distillation of Reading Heuristics for Exploratory Manipulation Trace QA

    Jun 7, 2026Haizhou Ge, Yufei Jia, Yue Li +5Robotic ManipulationVideo Reasoning

    Tsinghua University · DISCOVER Robotics

  27. GEAR-VLA: Learning Geometry-Aware Action Representations for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

    Jun 7, 2026Yuan Zhang, Shiqi Zhang, Yedong Shen +11Generalization in Robotic ManipulationCross-Embodiment Robot Learning

    Anhui University · University of Science and Technology of China · iFLYTEK

  28. PACT: Self-Evolving Physical Safety Alignment for Diffusion Policies in Embodied Manipulation

    Jun 7, 2026Lingxuan Wu, Zijian Zhu, Lizhong Wang +5Robot Policy LearningDiffusion Policy

    Dept. of Comp. Sci. and Tech., Institute for AI, Tsinghua-Bosch Joint ML Center, THBI Lab, BNRist Center, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China · Peng Cheng Laboratory, 518108, China

  29. Uncertainty-Aware Action Segmentation for Human-to-Robot Assembly Teleoperation

    Jun 6, 2026Fnu Heman, Yixuan Wang, Kolin Xu +7Temporal Action SegmentationRobot Teleoperation

    Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA. · Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Miami, FL, USA.

  30. SynthICL: Scalable In-context Imitation Learning with Synthetic Data

    Jun 6, 2026Cheng Qian, Ruomeng Fan, Yifei Ren +2ICL for RoboticsRobot Skill Learning

    The Robot Learning Lab Imperial College London