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. COFFAIL: A Dataset of Successful and Anomalous Robot Skill Executions in the Context of Coffee Preparation

    Apr 20, 2026Alex Mitrevski, Ayush SalunkeRobot Skill LearningRobotic Data Collection

    Division of Systems and Control, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden · Autonomous Systems Group, Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Sankt Augustin, Germany

  2. ST-ππ: Structured SpatioTemporal VLA for Robotic Manipulation

    Apr 20, 2026Chuanhao Ma, Hanyu Zhou, Shihan Peng +3Language-Conditioned Robot ManipulationRobotics

    School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology · School of Computing, National University of Singapore · School of Computing, Macquarie University

  3. OFlow: Injecting Object-Aware Temporal Flow Matching for Robust Robotic Manipulation

    Apr 20, 2026Kuanning Wang, Ke Fan, Chenhao Qiu +5VLM RobustnessFlow Matching

    Fudan University Shanghai, China · University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA, USA · KAUST Saudi Arabia

  4. DART: Learning-Enhanced Model Predictive Control for Dual-Arm Non-Prehensile Manipulation

    Apr 20, 2026Autrio Das, Shreya Bollimuntha, Madala Venkata Renu Jeevesh +5Non-Prehensile Robotic ManipulationBimanual Robotic Manipulation

  5. ReFineVLA: Multimodal Reasoning-Aware Generalist Robotic Policies via Teacher-Guided Fine-Tuning

    Apr 20, 2026Tuan Van Vo, Tan Q. Nguyen, Khang Nguyen +5Robotic ManipulationVLM Reasoning

    VinRobotics, Hanoi. Vietnam · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), UAE. · University of Texas at Arlington, Texas, USA +4

  6. AnchorRefine: Synergy-Manipulation Based on Trajectory Anchor and Residual Refinement for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Apr 20, 2026Tingzheng Jia, Kan Guo, Lanping Qian +6Robot Policy LearningLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

    Beijing University of Technology Beijing, China · Beihang University Beijing, China · Nanjing University of Science and Technology Nanjing, China

  7. MM-Hand: A 21-DOF Multi-modal Modular Dexterous Robotic Hand with Remote Actuation

    Apr 19, 2026Zhuoheng Li, Qingquan Lin, Checheng Yu +5Robotic Hand DesignDexterous Manipulation

    The University of Hong Kong · City University of Hong Kong · XiFengGu Ltd.

  8. LongBench: Evaluating Robotic Manipulation Policies on Real-World Long-Horizon Tasks

    Apr 18, 2026Xueyao Chen, Jingkai Jia, Tong Yang +3Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobotic Policy Evaluation

    Fudan University

  9. Rewind-IL: Online Failure Detection and State Respawning for Imitation Learning

    Apr 17, 2026Gehan Zheng, Sanjay Seenivasan, Matthew Johnson-Roberson +1Robot Failure DetectionRobot Failure Recovery

    College of Connected Computing, Vanderbilt University, USA. · School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada. · School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, Australia. +1

  10. Emergency Stopping for Liquid-manipulating Robots

    Apr 17, 2026Samuli Hynninen, Ville KyrkiRobotic ControlRobot Safety

    Intelligent Robotics Group at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation, School of Electrical Engineering, Aalto University, Finland.

  11. AEGIS: Anchor-Enforced Gradient Isolation for Knowledge-Preserving Vision-Language-Action Fine-Tuning

    Apr 17, 2026Guransh SinghVLM AdaptationRobotic Manipulation

    Independent Researcher

  12. VADF: Vision-Adaptive Diffusion Policy Framework for Efficient Robotic Manipulation

    Apr 17, 2026Xinglei Yu, Zhenyang Liu, Shufeng Nan +2Adaptive InferenceDiffusion Policy

    Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute

  13. Continual Hand-Eye Calibration for Open-world Robotic Manipulation

    Apr 17, 2026Fazeng Li, Gan Sun, Chenxi Liu +3Hand-Eye CalibrationCamera Pose Estimation

    School of Automation Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510641, China · State Key Laboratory of Robotics, the Institutes for Robotics and Intelligent Manufacturing, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110169, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

  14. ShapeGen: Robotic Data Generation for Category-Level Manipulation

    Apr 16, 2026Yirui Wang, Xiuwei Xu, Angyuan Ma +3Robotic Data CollectionGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    Tsinghua University

  15. One-Shot Cross-Geometry Skill Transfer through Part Decomposition

    Apr 16, 2026Skye Thompson, Ondrej Biza, George KonidarisRobot Skill LearningGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    Brown University · Northeastern University

  16. A Hierarchical Spatiotemporal Action Tokenizer for In-Context Imitation Learning in Robotics

    Apr 16, 2026Fawad Javed Fateh, Ali Shah Ali, Murad Popattia +4ICL for RoboticsVector Quantization

    Retrocausal, Inc., Redmond, WA 98052, USA

  17. DockAnywhere: Data-Efficient Visuomotor Policy Learning for Mobile Manipulation via Novel Demonstration Generation

    Apr 16, 2026Ziyu Shan, Yuheng Zhou, Gaoyuan Wu +3Mobile ManipulationGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  18. Differentiable Object Pose Connectivity Metrics for Regrasp Sequence Optimization

    Apr 16, 2026Liang Qin, Weiwei Wan, Kensuke HaradaRobotic GraspingRobotic Manipulation

    All authors are with the Graduate School of Engineering Science, The University of Osaka, Japan.

  19. HiVLA: A Visual-Grounded-Centric Hierarchical Embodied Manipulation System

    Apr 15, 2026Tianshuo Yang, Guanyu Chen, Yutian Chen +8Hierarchical Robot ControlVisual Grounding for Robotics

    The University of Hong Kong · Shanghai AI Laboratory · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +1

  20. UMI-3D: Extending Universal Manipulation Interface from Vision-Limited to 3D Spatial Perception

    Apr 15, 2026Ziming WangRobotic Data CollectionRobotic Manipulation

    HKU · USTC

  21. Scale-Invariant Sampling in Multi-Arm Bandit Motion Planning for Object Extraction

    Apr 15, 2026Servet B. Bayraktar, Andreas Orthey, Marc ToussaintSampling-Based Motion PlanningRobot Task Planning

    Technical University of Berlin

  22. Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting for Reinforcement Learning Robotic Agents

    Apr 15, 2026Angelo Moroncelli, Roberto Zanetti, Marco Maccarini +1RL for RoboticsData-Efficient Robot Learning

    University of Applied Science and Arts of Southern Switzerland, Department of Innovative Technologies, IDSIA-SUPSI, Lugano, Switzerland · Università della Svizzera Italiana, Faculty of Informatics, Lugano, Switzerland · Politecnico di Milano, Mechanical Department, Milano, Italy

  23. Evolvable Embodied Agent for Robotic Manipulation via Long Short-Term Reflection and Optimization

    Apr 15, 2026Jianzong Wang, Botao Zhao, Yayun He +2Self-Evolving AgentsRobotic Manipulation

    Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. Shenzhen, China

  24. XRZero-G0: Pushing the Frontier of Dexterous Robotic Manipulation with Interfaces, Quality and Ratios

    Apr 14, 2026James Wang, Primo Pu, Zephyr Fung +19Robotic Data CollectionRobotic Manipulation

    X SQUARE ROBOT

  25. Robotic Manipulation is Vision-to-Geometry Mapping: Vision-Geometry Backbones over Language and Video Models

    Apr 14, 2026Zijian Song, Qichang Li, Jiawei Zhou +4Robotic ManipulationVision-Based Robot Control

    Sun Yat-sen University · LongCat, Meituan · X-Era AI Lab +2

  26. Frequency-aware decomposition learning for sensorless wrench estimation in vibration-rich robotic contact

    Apr 14, 2026Hyeonbeen Lee, Min-Jae Jung, Tae-Kyeong Yeu +4Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationFrequency-Domain Feature Learning

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kyung Hee University, South Korea

  27. Disentangled Point Diffusion for Precise Object Placement

    Apr 13, 2026Lyuxing He, Eric Cai, Shobhit Aggarwal +2Robotic ManipulationGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    The authors are with Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. · The author is with ABB Inc., USA.

  28. Identifying and Exploiting Structure in Robot Co-Design

    Apr 13, 2026Apoorv Vaish, Oliver BrockRobot Morphology-Control Co-DesignRobotic Manipulation

    Robotics and Biology Laboratory, Technische Universität Berlin · Science of Intelligence (SCIoI), Cluster of Excellence, Berlin · Robotics Institute Germany (RIG)

  29. StarVLA-αα: Reducing Complexity in Vision-Language-Action Systems

    Apr 13, 2026Jinhui Ye, Ning Gao, Senqiao Yang +7Robot Foundation ModelsRobotic Manipulation

    HKUST · XJTU · CUHK +3

  30. Grounded World Model: Latent Planning with Language Goals

    Apr 13, 2026Quanyi Li, Lan Feng, Haonan Zhang +4Language-Conditioned Robot PlanningWorld Models for Robotics

    EPFL · NUS