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. AffordSim: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark for Affordance-Aware Robotic Manipulation

    Apr 13, 2026Mingyang Li, Haofan Xu, Haowen Sun +10Affordance-Based Robotic ManipulationRobot Manipulation Datasets

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Xi’an Jiaotong University

  2. Micro-Dexterity in Biological Micromanipulation: Embodiment, Perception, and Control

    Apr 13, 2026Kangyi Lu, Lan Wei, Zongcai Tan +1Dexterous ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Department of Bioengineering, Imperial-X AI Initiative, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

  3. CLASP: Closed-loop Asynchronous Spatial Perception for Open-vocabulary Desktop Object Grasping

    Apr 13, 2026Yiran Ling, Wenxuan Li, Siying Dong +5Spatial Grounding for VLA ModelsRobotic Grasping

    Harbin Institute of Technology · National Key Laboratory of Smart Farm Technologies and Systems · Northeastern University +1

  4. 3D-Anchored Lookahead Planning for Persistent Robotic Scene Memory via World-Model-Based MCTS

    Apr 13, 2026Bronislav Sidik, Dror MizrahiRobotic Spatial MemoryRobotics

    Huawei Technologies, Israel R&D Center

  5. ViserDex: Visual Sim-to-Real for Robust Dexterous In-hand Reorientation

    Apr 13, 2026Arjun Bhardwaj, Maximum Wilder-Smith, Mayank Mittal +2Robotic ManipulationDexterous Manipulation

    ETH Zurich · NVIDIA

  6. AIM: Intent-Aware Unified world action Modeling with Spatial Value Maps

    Apr 13, 2026Liaoyuan Fan, Zetian Xu, Chen Cao +3World Action ModelsRobotic Manipulation

    INFIFORCE Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., Hangzhou, China · The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

  7. AffordGen: Generating Diverse Demonstrations for Generalizable Object Manipulation with Afford Correspondence

    Apr 12, 2026Jiawei Zhang, Kaizhe Hu, Yingqian Huang +3Affordance-Based Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute · Tsinghua University · Fudan University +1

  8. AnySlot: Goal-Conditioned Vision-Language-Action Policies for Zero-Shot Slot-Level Placement

    Apr 12, 2026Zhaofeng Hu, Sifan Zhou, Qinbo Zhang +4Goal-Conditioned Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, USA · Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA · MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi, UAE +1

  9. Device-Conditioned Neural Architecture Search for Efficient Robotic Manipulation

    Apr 11, 2026Yiming Wu, Huan Wang, Zhenghao Chen +2Hardware-Aware NASRobotic Manipulation

    The University of Hong Kong, China · Westlake University, China · The University of Newcastle, Australia

  10. V-CAGE: Vision-Closed-Loop Agentic Generation Engine for Robotic Manipulation

    Apr 10, 2026Yaru Liu, Ao-bo Wang, Nanyang YeSynthetic Data Generation for RoboticsRobotic Manipulation

    University of Cambridge · Wuhan University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  11. Task-Aware Bimanual Affordance Prediction via VLM-Guided Semantic-Geometric Reasoning

    Apr 9, 2026Fabian Hahne, Vignesh Prasad, Georgia Chalvatzaki +2Bimanual Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Darmstadt · Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence (Hessian.AI), Darmstadt · Robotics Institute Germany (RIG) +2

  12. A-SLIP: Acoustic Sensing for Continuous In-hand Slip Estimation

    Apr 9, 2026Uksang Yoo, Yuemin Mao, Jean Oh +1Tactile SensingRobotic Tactile Sensing

    Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

  13. Sumo: Dynamic and Generalizable Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation

    Apr 9, 2026John Z. Zhang, Maks Sorokin, Jan Brüdigam +14Robotic Loco-ManipulationGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    MIT · RAI Institute · Cornell University

  14. LAMP: Lift Image-Editing as General 3D Priors for Open-world Manipulation

    Apr 9, 2026Jingjing Wang, Zhengdong Hong, Chong Bao +3Generalization in Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University

  15. BLaDA: Bridging Language to Functional Dexterous Actions within 3DGS Fields

    Apr 9, 2026Fan Yang, Wenrui Chen, Guorun Yan +7Robotic ManipulationRobotic Grasping

    School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University, Changsha 410012, China. · National Engineering Research Center of Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China. · Key Laboratory of Advanced Manufacturing Technology of the Ministry of Education, Guizhou University, Guiyang 550025, China.

  16. EMMa: End-Effector Stability-Oriented Mobile Manipulation for Tracked Rescue Robots

    Apr 9, 2026Yifei Wang, Hao Zhang, Jidong Huang +2Mobile ManipulationRobot Motion Generation

  17. A Physical Agentic Loop for Language-Guided Grasping with Execution-State Monitoring

    Apr 8, 2026Wenze Wang, Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Feras DayoubRobotic ManipulationLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

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

  18. RichMap: A Reachability Map Balancing Precision, Efficiency, and Flexibility for Rich Robot Manipulation Tasks

    Apr 8, 2026Yupu Lu, Yuxiang Ma, Jia PanRobotic Manipulation

    School of Computing and Data Science, The University of Hong Kong, HKSAR · Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA

  19. Occlusion Handling by Pushing for Enhanced Fruit Detection

    Apr 7, 2026Ege Gursoy, Dana Kulić, Andrea CherubiniAgricultural RoboticsActive Vision for Robot Manipulation

    LIRMM, Univ. Montpellier, CNRS, Montpellier, France · Monash University, Clayton, Australia

  20. Learning-Guided Force-Feedback Model Predictive Control with Obstacle Avoidance for Robotic Deburring

    Apr 7, 2026Krzysztof Wojciechowski, Ege Gursoy, Arthur Haffemayer +4Force-Controlled Robotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    LAAS-CNRS, Universite de Toulouse, CNRS, Toulouse, France · Inria, AUCTUS team, Talence, France · Image and Pervasive Access Laboratory (IPAL), CNRS-UMI, 2955, Singapore +1

  21. A1: A Fully Transparent Open-Source, Adaptive and Efficient Truncated Vision-Language-Action Model

    Apr 7, 2026Kaidong Zhang, Jian Zhang, Rongtao Xu +20Flow-Based VLA ModelsVision-Language-Action Models

    SYSU · Spatialtemporal AI · MBZUAI

  22. SnapFlow: One-Step Action Generation for Flow-Matching VLAs via Progressive Self-Distillation

    Apr 7, 2026Wuyang Luan, Junhui Li, Weiguang Zhao +2Efficient VLA Model InferenceVision-Language-Action Models

    Jilin University · Chongqing University · University of Liverpool +1

  23. Referring-Aware Visuomotor Policy Learning for Closed-Loop Manipulation

    Apr 7, 2026Jiahua Ma, Yiran Qin, Xin Wen +5Visuomotor Policy LearningRobot Policy Adaptation

    Sun Yat-sen University · Oxford University.

  24. Simulation-Driven Evolutionary Motion Parameterization for Contact-Rich Granular Scooping with a Soft Conical Robotic Hand

    Apr 7, 2026Yongliang Wang, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Tomoya Takahashi +1Robotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    OMRON SINIC X Corporation, Tokyo, Japan. · Department of Artificial Intelligence, Bernoulli Institute, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

  25. AnyUser: Translating Sketched User Intent into Domestic Robots

    Apr 6, 2026Songyuan Yang, Huibin Tan, Kailun Yang +2Human-Robot InteractionAssistive Robotics

    the College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan 410073, China · the School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and the National Engineering Research Center of Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Hunan University, Changsha, Hunan 410082, China

  26. Pickalo: Leveraging 6D Pose Estimation for Low-Cost Industrial Bin Picking

    Apr 6, 2026Alessandro Tarsi, Matteo Mastrogiuseppe, Saverio Taliani +2Robotic GraspingObject Pose Estimation

    MESH Facility (formerly iCub Tech), Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova 16163, Italy · Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR), Paris 75005, France · Generative Bionics, Genova 16152, Italy +1

  27. Real-Time Projected Adaptive Control for Closed-Chain Co-Manipulative Continuum Robots

    Apr 5, 2026Rana Danesh, Farrokh Janabi-Sharifi, Farhad AghiliContinuum Robot ControlAdaptive Control

    Department of Mechanical, Industrial, and Mechatronics Engineering, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON M5B 2K3, Canada · Department of Mechanical, Industrial, and Aerospace Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada

  28. Adaptive Action Chunking at Inference-time for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Apr 5, 2026Yuanchang Liang, Xiaobo Wang, Kai Wang +5Action ChunkingVision-Language-Action Models

    National University of Singapore · Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology · Sangfor Technologies Inc. +3

  29. VLA-Forget: Vision-Language-Action Unlearning for Embodied Foundation Models

    Apr 5, 2026Ravi Ranjan, Agoritsa PolyzouVLM UnlearningVision-Language-Action Models

    Florida International University Miami, USA

  30. From Video to Control: A Survey of Learning Manipulation Interfaces from Temporal Visual Data

    Apr 4, 2026Linfang Zheng, Zikai Ouyang, Chen Wang +2Robot Learning from VideoVision-Based Robot Control

    The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China · Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China · Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China +1