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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1,704 papers341 papers in the last four weeks, up 29% on the four weeks before. 2.0% of all new papers.

  1. GraphPoint: Semantic Entity Graphs and Point Trajectories for Compositional Robot Manipulation

    Sep 16, 2026Kang Luo, Hesheng WangLong-Horizon Robotic ManipulationLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

    IRMV Lab, the Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  2. RAFAIL: Relationship-Aware Failure Detection for Robotic Manipulation

    Sep 16, 2026Loris Schneider, Edgar Welte, Rania RayyesRobot Failure DetectionFault Detection

    Institute for Material Handling and Logistics (IFL), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 76131, Germany.

  3. Acting in Meters: Learning Metric Interactions for Precise Robotic Manipulation

    Sep 16, 2026Lijie Wang, Zheng Lu, Yiming Wang +12Language-Conditioned Robot ManipulationGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    Sun Yat-sen University

  4. Reinforcement Learning for Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Policies

    Sep 16, 2026Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Dorsa Sadigh +1Robot Policy AdaptationClosed-Loop Control of VLA Models

    Stanford University

  5. Energy-Regularized Imitation Learning for Force- and Work-Aware Robotic Manipulation

    Sep 16, 2026Toshiki Otani, Hiromu Taketsugu, Norimichi UkitaRobotic RLRobotic Manipulation

    Toyota Technological Institute, Japan

  6. "Your Robot Was Trained on a Lie": Collision Mesh Poisoning Attacks on Robotic Manipulation

    Sep 16, 2026Gengyang Xu, Dongwei Xiao, Yiteng Peng +6Robotic ManipulationRobotics Simulation

    Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Zhejiang University

  7. Fetch My Beer: Synthetic-to-real Hierarchical Policy for Smooth Pick-and-place

    Sep 16, 2026Yingyue Li, Chenyangguang Zhang, Ruida Zhang +3Robot Policy LearningHierarchical RL

    Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland · Beijing Xiaomi Robot Technology Co., Ltd, Beijing, China +1

  8. Causal-History Test-Time Scaling for Failure Recovery in Autoregressive World-Action Models

    Sep 16, 2026Lin Li, Long Chen, Kwunhang +10World Models for RoboticsWorld Models

    Edwin · Tim · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), ACCESS – AI Chip Center for Emerging Smart Systems, and Zhejiang University. +1

  9. Vision-Language Grounded Task-Context-Aware Imitation Learning for Robotic Disassembly

    Sep 15, 2026Jeon Ho Kang, Igal Tamarkin, Ethan Niu +2Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

    Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

  10. Modality-Autoregressive World-Action Models

    Sep 15, 2026Adam Hung, Bardienus P. Duisterhof, Deva Ramanan +1World Model LearningRobotic Manipulation

    Carnegie Mellon University

  11. Residual Fault Adaptation for Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation Under Runtime Joint Faults

    Sep 15, 2026Linan Deng, Xing Liu, Lin Hong +4Dexterous ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China · School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China · School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, MOE Key Lab of Intelligent Control and Image Processing, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China

  12. Fingers as Legs: Learning Self-Supported Locomotion and Manipulation with an Anthropomorphic Hand

    Sep 15, 2026Amirhossein Kazemipour, Hehui Zheng, Robert KatzschmannRL for RoboticsMobile Manipulation

    Soft Robotics Lab, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  13. GeoLAM: Learning Geometry-Grounded Latent Actions from Unlabeled Human Videos

    Sep 15, 2026Yifan Xie, Hekun Tian, Jinkun Liu +3Latent Action LearningGeometric Representation Learning

    Tsinghua University · Beijing Institute of Technology · Fudan University

  14. TEMPO: Learning Temporal Context for Dynamic Robot Manipulation

    Sep 15, 2026Zhenyang Feng, Jimin Heo, Erik B. Sudderth +1Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

    University of California, Irvine

  15. ProxiDex: Learning Dynamics-Guided Proximity Policy for Dexterous Manipulation

    Sep 15, 2026Yushan Bai, Boyu Zheng, Zhiyang Mao +4Robot Policy LearningContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    CAS Engineering Laboratory for Intelligent Industrial Vision, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Intelligent Science and Technology, Xinjiang University +1

  16. UniDex-ViTac: Learning Unified Visuo-Tactile Dexterous Manipulation Policy from Human Video Data

    Sep 15, 2026Hyesung Lee, Si-Hwan Heo, Sungwook YangRL for RoboticsVisuomotor Policy Learning

    Center for Humanoid Research, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul 02792, Republic of Korea · Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul 02455, Republic of Korea

  17. ManiSkillFormer: Demonstration-Free Compositional Manipulation via Geometric Contracts and Agentic Skill Graph

    Sep 14, 2026Peiqi Yu, Mosam Dabhi, Shangtao Li +3Robot Skill LearningLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

    Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

  18. Bench2Dex: Benchmarking Visuo-Tactile Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation Across Dexterous Hands

    Sep 14, 2026Zhenjie Yang, Yideng Zhang, Dongjie Zhang +21Dexterous ManipulationBimanual Robotic Manipulation

    The University of Hong Kong · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Fudan University +4

  19. DIDO: Distilling Interaction-Centric Dynamics into One-Step Denoising for World Action Models

    Sep 14, 2026Jing Lyu, Shuanghao Bai, Runze Xiao +11World Models for RoboticsDiffusion Model Distillation

    Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) +3

  20. StereoPatch: Patch-Aligned RGB-Depth Fusion for Spatial Perception in Robot Manipulation

    Sep 14, 2026Yanan Zhou, Zhaoyan Qian, James Zhao +1Generalization in Robotic ManipulationVisuomotor Policy Learning

    School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, Australia. · Australian Centre for Robotics, The University of Sydney, Australia.

  21. LieSpline-DP: Lie-Group B-Spline Diffusion Policy for Smooth Robot Manipulation

    Sep 14, 2026Erxuan Xie, Bang Liu, Pingyun Nie +3Robot Motion GenerationDiffusion Policy

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  22. Task-Distribution-Aware Counterweight Synthesis and Constrained Co-Design for Serial Manipulators

    Sep 14, 2026Mohammad AbbadiRoboticsRobotic Manipulation

    College of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Dubai Dubai, United Arab Emirates

  23. Steering Generative Robot Policies with Lexicographic Preferences

    Sep 14, 2026Yixuan Jia, Jonathan P. HowDiffusion PolicyRobotic Manipulation

    Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02319 USA

  24. IMPACT-VLA: Interaction-aware Multimodal Propagation Attribution via Counterfactual Trajectories for Vision-Language-Action Policies

    Sep 14, 2026Jinwoong Kim, Sangjin ParkRobotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

    Department of Industrial Data Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.

  25. Primitive-Informed Sampling-Based MPC for Multi-Fingered Dexterous Manipulation

    Sep 14, 2026Emek Barış Küçüktabak, Karankumar Patel, Jinda Cui +3Robotic GraspingDexterous Manipulation

    Honda Research Institute USA, San Jose, CA, USA · Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA (Work done during an internship at HRI)

  26. REVOLVE: An Automated Closed-Loop Framework for Evolving Robot Manipulation with Minimal Human Intervention

    Sep 13, 2026Hanyu Liu, Qian Li, Yizhu Ding +8Continual Robot LearningRobot Failure Recovery

    Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Advanced Food Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, School of Mechanical Engineering, Jiangnan University, Wuxi 214122, China.

  27. VLBiMan++: Expanding the Generalization Boundary of Vision-Language Anchored One-Shot Bimanual Manipulation

    Sep 13, 2026Huayi Zhou, Wei Gao, Yiyang Han +2Bimanual Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Visual Media and Multidimensional Intelligence, College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University

  28. GIFT: Glove-Inferred Force Transfer: Force-Aware Human-to-Robot Skill Transfer from a Wearable Sensing Glove to a Robot Hand Without Tactile Sensors

    Sep 12, 2026Tzach SarusiRobotic GraspingRobotic Manipulation

  29. Vision-Force Admittance Learning for Peg Insertion into a Movable Hole

    Sep 12, 2026Yuzhong Chen, Yongqing Liang, Yunzhi Xu +6Robotic InsertionRobotic Manipulation

    New York University, Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA · General Motors, Warren, MI 48073, USA

  30. What Makes an Efficient VLA? Navigating Action-Head Design, Scaling, and Latency

    Sep 12, 2026Luoyang Sun, Guoyang Xia, Fengfa Li +9Efficient VLA ModelsRobotic Manipulation

    Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · AI Lab, The Yangtze River Delta +4