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. Grounding Vision and Language to 3D Masks for Long-Horizon Box Rearrangement

    Mar 24, 2026Ashish Malik, Caleb Lowe, Aayam Shrestha +3Robot Task PlanningRobotic Manipulation

    Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering, Oregon State University

  2. Efficient Hybrid SE(3)-Equivariant Visuomotor Flow Policy via Spherical Harmonics for Robot Manipulation

    Mar 24, 2026Qinglun Zhang, Shen Cheng, Tian Dan +3Visuomotor Policy LearningRobot Learning

    University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Dexmal

  3. Gaze-Regularized Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 24, 2026Anupam Pani, Yanchao YangVLMs for RoboticsRobotic Manipulation

    Institute of Data Science, University Of Hong Kong

  4. PHANTOM Hand

    Mar 24, 2026Teng Yan, Jiongxu Chen, Qixiang Hua +4Robotic Hand DesignRobotic Manipulation

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

  5. Training-Free Interaction-Aligned Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Embodied Manipulation

    Mar 24, 2026Jintao Cheng, Weibin Li, Haozhe Wang +7Visual Token PruningEfficient VLA Model Inference

    Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China · University of Macau, Macau, China · School of Data Science and Engineering, Xingzhi College, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China +3

  6. Agile-VLA: Few-Shot Industrial Pose Rectification via Implicit Affordance Anchoring

    Mar 24, 2026Teng Yan, Zhengyang Pei, Chengyu Shi +8Affordance-Based Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

  7. VLGOR: Visual-Language Knowledge Guided Offline Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Agents

    Mar 24, 2026Pengsen Liu, Maosen Zeng, Nan Tang +4Offline RLVLMs for Robotics

    National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, China & School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University, China · Computational Intelligence Center (CIC), School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Shandong Jianzhu University, Jinan, 250101, China

  8. Grounding Sim-to-Real Generalization in Robotic Manipulation: An Empirical Study with Vision-Language-Action Models

    Mar 24, 2026Ruixing Jin, Zicheng Zhu, Ruixiang Ouyang +4Domain RandomizationRobotics Simulation

    School of Data Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen · Shenzhen Loop Area Institute

  9. DecompGrind: A Decomposition Framework for Robotic Grinding via Cutting-Surface Planning and Contact-Force Adaptation

    Mar 24, 2026Shunsuke Araki, Takumi Hachimine, Yuki Saito +3Robotic Tool UseRobotic Manipulation

    Division of Information Science, Graduate School of Science and Technology, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Nara, Japan. · Haptics Research Center, Keio University, Kanagawa, Japan. · Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. +1

  10. GIFT: Generalizing Intent for Flexible Test-Time Rewards

    Mar 23, 2026Fin Amin, Nathaniel Dennler, Andreea BobuGeneralization in Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    NC State · MIT CSAIL

  11. CaP-X: A Framework for Benchmarking and Improving Coding Agents for Robot Manipulation

    Mar 23, 2026Letian Fu, Justin Yu, Karim El-Refai +13Robotic ManipulationRobot Manipulation Benchmarks

    1NVIDIA · 2UC Berkeley · 3Stanford University +1

  12. UniDex: A Robot Foundation Suite for Universal Dexterous Hand Control from Egocentric Human Videos

    Mar 23, 2026Gu Zhang, Qicheng Xu, Haozhe Zhang +16Robotic ManipulationCross-Embodiment Robot Learning

    Tsinghua University · Shanghai Qizhi Institute · Sun Yat-sen University +1

  13. Beyond Viewpoint Generalization: What Multi-View Demonstrations Offer and How to Synthesize Them for Robot Manipulation?

    Mar 23, 2026Boyang Cai, Qiwei Liang, Jiawei Li +11Multi-View LearningGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Shenzhen University · Beijing Jiaotong University +1

  14. BiPreManip: Learning Affordance-Based Bimanual Preparatory Manipulation through Anticipatory Collaboration

    Mar 23, 2026Yan Shen, Feng Jiang, Zichen He +5Affordance-Based Robotic ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

    CFCS, School of Computer Science, Peking University

  15. A Framework for Closed-Loop Robotic Assembly, Alignment and Self-Recovery of Precision Optical Systems

    Mar 23, 2026Seou Choi, Sachin Vaidya, Caio Silva +4Robotic AssemblyLaboratory Automation

    Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA 02139, USA · NSF Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI) and the Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA 02139, USA · Nokia Bell Labs +1

  16. HyReach: Vision-Guided Hybrid Manipulator Reaching in Unseen Cluttered Environments

    Mar 22, 2026Shivani Kamtikar, Kendall Koe, Justin Wasserman +5Robotic ManipulationContinuum Robot Control

    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign · Skild AI

  17. GAPG: Geometry Aware Push-Grasping Synergy for Goal-Oriented Manipulation in Clutter

    Mar 22, 2026Lijingze Xiao, Jinhong Du, Yang Cong +2Robotic GraspingRobotic Manipulation

    College of Automation Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China.

  18. Affordance-Guided Enveloping Grasp Demonstration Toward Non-destructive Disassembly of Pinch-Infeasible Mating Parts

    Mar 22, 2026Masaki Tsutsumi, Takuya Kiyokawa, Gen Sako +1Robotic ManipulationRobotic Grasping

    Department of Systems Innovation, Graduate School of Engineering Science, The University of Osaka, 1-3 Machikaneyama, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan. · Industrial Cyber-physical Systems Research Center, The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), 2-3-26 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan.

  19. Cortical Policy: A Dual-Stream View Transformer for Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 22, 2026Xuening Zhang, Qi Lv, Xiang Deng +3Vision-Based Robot ControlRobotic Manipulation

    Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, Guangdong 518055, China · Shandong Jianzhu University, Jinan, Shandong 250101, China

  20. Geometrically Plausible Object Pose Refinement using Differentiable Simulation

    Mar 22, 2026Anil Zeybek, Rhys Newbury, Snehal Dikhale +3Object Pose EstimationRobotic Manipulation

    Technical University of Munich, Germany · Physical AI, Australia · Monash University, Australia +1

  21. StageCraft: Execution Aware Mitigation of Distractor and Obstruction Failures in VLA Models

    Mar 21, 2026Kartikay Milind Pangaonkar, Prabin Rath, Omkar Patil +1VLM RobustnessRobotic Manipulation

    Arizona State University

  22. Speedup Patch: Learning a Plug-and-Play Policy to Accelerate Embodied Manipulation

    Mar 21, 2026Zhichao Wu, Junyin Ye, Zhilong Zhang +6Robot Policy LearningRobotic Manipulation

    National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University, China · Mila-Quebec AI Institute & Université de Montréal, Canada

  23. KUKAloha: A General, Low-Cost, and Shared-Control based Teleoperation Framework for Construction Robot Arm

    Mar 20, 2026Yifan Xu, Qizhang Shen, Vineet Kamat +1Robot TeleoperationRobotic Control

    Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, United States of America · Department of Robotics, University of Michigan, United States of America

  24. Speculative Policy Orchestration: A Latency-Resilient Framework for Cloud-Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 19, 2026Chanh Nguyen, Shutong Jin, Florian T. Pokorny +1Robotic ControlRobotics

    Department of Computing Science, Ume˚a University, 90187 Ume˚a, Sweden · School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 10044 Stockholm, Sweden

  25. VAMPO: Policy Optimization for Improving Visual Dynamics in Video Action Models

    Mar 19, 2026Zirui Ge, Pengxiang Ding, Baohua Yin +16Video Diffusion ModelsVideo Prediction

    Zhejiang University · OpenHelix Robotics · Westlake University +10

  26. V-Dreamer: Automating Robotic Simulation and Trajectory Synthesis via Video Generation Priors

    Mar 19, 2026Songjia He, Zixuan Chen, Hongyu Ding +5Synthetic Data Generation for RoboticsRobotic Manipulation

    Nanjing University. · Northwestern Polytechnical University.

  27. Robotic Agentic Platform for Intelligent Electric Vehicle Disassembly

    Mar 19, 2026Zachary Allen, Max Conway, Lyle Antieau +2Robotic ManipulationLanguage Model-Based Control

    Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder.

  28. MemoAct: Atkinson-Shiffrin-Inspired Hierarchical Memory-Augmented Policy for Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 19, 2026Liufan Tan, Jiale Li, Gangshan JingMemory-Augmented AgentsRobot Policy Learning

  29. ManiDreams: An Open-Source Library for Robust Object Manipulation via Uncertainty-aware Task-specific Intuitive Physics

    Mar 18, 2026Gaotian Wang, Kejia Ren, Andrew S. Morgan +1Robotic ManipulationRobot Task Planning

    Department of Computer Science, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA · Robotics and AI Institute, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA

  30. Offload or Overload: A Platform Measurement Study of Mobile Robotic Manipulation Workloads

    Mar 18, 2026Sara Pohland, Xenofon Foukas, Ganesh Ananthanarayanan +4RoboticsRobotic Manipulation

    UC Berkeley · Microsoft Corp.