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. One-Step Flow Policy: Self-Distillation for Fast Visuomotor Policies

    Mar 12, 2026Shaolong Li, Lichao Sun, Yongchao ChenVisuomotor Policy LearningOne-Step Generative Modeling

    CSE Department, University of Michigan · Lehigh University · College of AI, Tsinghua University

  2. Push, Press, Slide: Mode-Aware Planar Contact Manipulation via Reduced-Order Models

    Mar 12, 2026Melih Özcan, Umut Orguner, Ozgur S. OguzNon-Prehensile Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Dept. of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkiye. · Dept. of Computer Engineering, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkiye.

  3. HumDex: Humanoid Dexterous Manipulation Made Easy

    Mar 12, 2026Liang Heng, Yihe Tang, Jiajun Xu +3Robotic ManipulationWhole-Body Robotic Manipulation

    USC Physical Superintelligence (PSI) Lab · WorldEngine AI

  4. HandelBot: Real-World Piano Playing via Fast Adaptation of Dexterous Robot Policies

    Mar 12, 2026Amber Xie, Haozhi Qi, Dorsa SadighRobotic ManipulationBimanual Robotic Manipulation

    Stanford University · Amazon FAR (Frontier AI & Robotics)

  5. SaPaVe: Towards Active Perception and Manipulation in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotics

    Mar 12, 2026Mengzhen Liu, Enshen Zhou, Cheng Chi +6Active Vision for Robot ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence · School of Software, Beihang University

  6. CRAFT: A Tendon-Driven Hand with Hybrid Hard-Soft Compliance

    Mar 12, 2026Leo Lin, Shivansh Patel, Jay Moon +2Robotic Hand DesignRobotic Grasping

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · UC Irvine

  7. Ada3Drift: Adaptive Training-Time Drifting for One-Step 3D Visuomotor Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 12, 2026Chongyang Xu, Yixian Zou, Tianyu Yang +4Robot Policy LearningRobot Skill Learning

    College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China · School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

  8. A Generalized Theory of Load Distribution in Redundantly-actuated Robotic Systems

    Mar 12, 2026Joshua Flight, Clément GosselinRobotic ManipulationRobotic Control

    Département de génie mécanique et de génie industriel, Université Laval, Canada.

  9. Vision-Based Hand Shadowing for Robotic Manipulation via Inverse Kinematics

    Mar 11, 2026Hendrik Chiche, Antoine Jamme, Trevor Rigoberto Martinez +1Motion RetargetingRobotic Manipulation

    OMGrab Inc. and affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 USA, through the Capstone Project program of the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership · Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 USA

  10. PPGuide: Steering Diffusion Policies with Performance Predictive Guidance

    Mar 11, 2026Zixing Wang, Devesh K. Jha, Ahmed H. Qureshi +1Diffusion GuidanceDiffusion Policy

    Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, IN 47907, USA. · Contribution was conducted while the author was at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. · Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA.

  11. ContactExplorer: Contact Coverage-Guided Exploration for General-Purpose Dexterous Manipulation

    Mar 11, 2026Zixuan Liu, Ruoyi Qiao, Chenrui Tie +5Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRL Exploration

    School of Computing, National University of Singapore · RoboScience

  12. FutureVLA: Joint Visuomotor Prediction for Vision-Language-Action Model

    Mar 11, 2026Xiaoxu Xu, Hao Li, Jinhui Ye +7Vision-Language-Action ModelsVisuomotor Policy Learning

    Beihang University. · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. · University of Science and Technology of China. +1

  13. RC-NF: Robot-Conditioned Normalizing Flow for Real-Time Anomaly Detection in Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 11, 2026Shijie Zhou, Bin Zhu, Jiarui Yang +3Robotic Anomaly DetectionAnomaly Detection

    Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI, Fudan University · Shanghai Key Laboratory of Multimodal Embodied AI · Singapore Management University

  14. BinWalker: Development and Field Evaluation of a Quadruped Manipulator Platform for Sustainable Litter Collection

    Mar 11, 2026Giulio Turrisi, Angelo Bratta, Giovanni Minelli +4RoboticsRobotic Manipulation

    Dynamic Legged Systems · Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) · Genova, Italy

  15. FAR-Dex: Few-shot Data Augmentation and Adaptive Residual Policy Refinement for Dexterous Manipulation

    Mar 11, 2026Yushan Bai, Fulin Chen, Hongzheng Sun +3Robotic ManipulationResidual Policy Learning

    Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China, also with the School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 100049, China, also with the CAS Engineering Laboratory for Intelligent Industrial Vision, Beijing 100190, China. · School of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering, Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Shanghai 201620 · Beijing Zhongke Huiling Robot Technology Co., Beijing 100192, China.

  16. Overcoming Visual Clutter in Vision Language Action Models via Concept-Gated Visual Distillation

    Mar 11, 2026Sangmim Song, Sarath Kodagoda, Marc Carmichael +1Vision-Language-Action ModelsRobustness of VLA Models

    University of Technology Sydney, NSW, Australia · Western Sydney University, NSW, Australia

  17. SELF-VLA: A Skill Enhanced Agentic Vision-Language-Action Framework for Contact-Rich Disassembly

    Mar 10, 2026Chang Liu, Sibo Tian, Xiao Liang +1Vision-Language-Action ModelsContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA. · Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.

  18. DRAFTO: Decoupled Reduced-space and Adaptive Feasibility-repair Trajectory Optimization for Robotic Manipulators

    Mar 10, 2026Yichang Feng, Xiao Liang, Minghui ZhengTrajectory OptimizationRobotic Optimization

    Yichang Feng and Minghui Zheng are with the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA · Xiao Liang is with the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843 USA

  19. Cross-Hand Latent Representation for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Mar 10, 2026Guangqi Jiang, Yutong Liang, Jianglong Ye +6Robotic ManipulationCross-Embodiment Robot Learning

    UC San Diego · Amazon FAR · UC Berkeley

  20. AR-VLA: True Autoregressive Action Expert for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Mar 10, 2026Yutong Hu, Jan-Nico Zaech, Nikolay Nikolov +6Temporal Modeling for VLA ModelsVision-Language-Action Models

    ∗INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” · †KU Leuven, Dept. Mechanical Engineering, Research unit Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics · ‡KU Leuven, Dept. Electrical Engineering, Research unit Processing Speech and Images

  21. TiPToP: A Modular Open-Vocabulary Robot Manipulation System That Plans

    Mar 10, 2026William Shen, Nishanth Kumar, Sahit Chintalapudi +8Robotic ManipulationRobot Task Planning

    MIT CSAIL · University of Pennsylvania

  22. Emerging Extrinsic Dexterity in Cluttered Scenes via Dynamics-aware Policy Learning

    Mar 10, 2026Yixin Zheng, Jiangran Lyu, Yifan Zhang +8Non-Prehensile Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence · Galbot +2

  23. Robotic Scene Cloning:Advancing Zero-Shot Robotic Scene Adaptation in Manipulation via Visual Prompt Editing

    Mar 10, 2026Binyuan Huang, Yuqing Wen, Yucheng Zhao +5Robot Policy AdaptationZero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

    Binyuan Huang and Zhenzhong Chen are with Wuhan University. · Yuqing Wen is with University of Science and Technology of China. · Yucheng Zhao, Tiancai Wang and Haoqiang Fan are with Dexmal. +1

  24. NS-VLA: Towards Neuro-Symbolic Vision-Language-Action Models

    Mar 10, 2026Ziyue Zhu, Shangyang Wu, Shuai Zhao +8Vision-Language-Action ModelsRobotic Manipulation

    Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Nanyang Technological University

  25. Stein Variational Ergodic Surface Coverage with SE(3) Constraints

    Mar 10, 2026Jiayun Li, Yufeng Jin, Sangli Teng +2Safe Robot ManipulationTrajectory Optimization

    Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany. · Hessian.AI, Darmstadt, Germany. · Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH, Offenbach, Germany. +1

  26. TRIP-Bag: A Portable Teleoperation System for Plug-and-Play Robotic Arms and Leaders

    Mar 10, 2026Noboru Myers, Sankalp Yamsani, Obin Kwon +1Robotic Data CollectionRobot Teleoperation

    KIMLAB (Kinetic Intelligent Machine LAB), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, USA

  27. DexHiL: A Human-in-the-Loop Framework for Vision-Language-Action Model Post-Training in Dexterous Manipulation

    Mar 10, 2026Yifan Han, Zhongxi Chen, Yuxuan Zhao +5Robotic ManipulationRobot Learning

    CASIA · SJTU · Shanghai AI Laboratory

  28. PlayWorld: Learning Robot World Models from Autonomous Play

    Mar 9, 2026Tenny Yin, Zhiting Mei, Zhonghe Zheng +8World Models for RoboticsVideo World Models

    Princeton University

  29. OmniGuide: Universal Guidance Fields for Enhancing Generalist Robot Policies

    Mar 9, 2026Yunzhou Song, Long Le, Yong-Hyun Park +7Robot Policy LearningVision-Language-Action Models

    University of Pennsylvania

  30. Bilevel Planning with Learned Symbolic Abstractions from Interaction Data

    Mar 9, 2026Fatih Dogangun, Burcu Kilic, Serdar Bahar +1Hierarchical PlanningSymbolic Planning

    Department of Computer Engineering, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Türkiye. · Department of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Türkiye.