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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1,671 papers340 papers in the last four weeks, up 29% on the four weeks before. 2.0% of all new papers.

  1. UniLACT: Depth-Aware RGB Latent Action Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Feb 23, 2026Manish Kumar Govind, Dominick Reilly, Pu Wang +1Vision-Language-Action ModelsLatent Action Learning

    All authors are with the Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC, USA.

  2. AdaWorldPolicy: World-Model-Driven Diffusion Policy with Online Adaptive Learning for Robotic Manipulation

    Feb 23, 2026Ge Yuan, Qiyuan Qiao, Jing Zhang +1Robot Policy AdaptationRobotic Manipulation

    The University of Hong Kong · Beihang University

  3. FACTO: Function-space Adaptive Constrained Trajectory Optimization for Robotic Manipulators

    Feb 23, 2026Yichang Feng, Xiao Liang, Minghui ZhengTrajectory OptimizationRobotic Optimization

    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

  4. Towards Dexterous Embodied Manipulation via Deep Multi-Sensory Fusion and Sparse Expert Scaling

    Feb 23, 2026Yirui Sun, Guangyu Zhuge, Keliang Liu +5Robotic ManipulationMultimodal Sensor Fusion

    College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University · School of Information Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology

  5. Scalable Low-Density Distributed Manipulation Using an Interconnected Actuator Array

    Feb 23, 2026Bailey Dacre, Rodrigo Moreno, Jørn Lambertsen +2Robotic ManipulationModular Robotics

  6. Visual Prompt Guided Unified Pushing Policy

    Feb 22, 2026Hieu Bui, Ziyan Gao, Yuya Hosoda +1Robotic Object PushingRobotic Manipulation

    Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Japan. · Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST). · College of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Japan.

  7. Human-to-Robot Interaction: Learning from Video Demonstration for Robot Imitation

    Feb 22, 2026Thanh Nguyen Canh, Thanh-Tuan Tran, Haolan Zhang +3Learning from DemonstrationRobot Imitation Learning

    School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Nomi, 923-1211, Ishikawa, Japan. · University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University, 10000, Hanoi, Vietnam. · Department of Robotics, Hanyang University, Ansan, 15588, Gyeonggi, Korea.

  8. HeRO: Hierarchical 3D Semantic Representation for Pose-aware Object Manipulation

    Feb 21, 2026Chongyang Xu, Shen Cheng, Haipeng Li +3Robotic ManipulationRobot Imitation Learning

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

  9. RoboCurate: Harnessing Diversity with Action-Verified Neural Trajectory for Robot Learning

    Feb 21, 2026Seungku Kim, Suhyeok Jang, Byungjun Yoon +3Synthetic Data Generation for RoboticsSynthetic Data Augmentation

    KAIST · RLWRLD

  10. SimVLA: A Simple VLA Baseline for Robotic Manipulation

    Feb 20, 2026Yuankai Luo, Woping Chen, Tong Liang +2Vision-Language-Action ModelsVLMs for Robotics

    Frontier Robotics

  11. VLANeXt Family: A Systematic Study of VLA Models from Core Recipes to Emerging Paradigms

    Feb 20, 2026Xiao-Ming Wu, Kang Liao, Yihang Luo +6Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action Models

    S-Lab, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · ACE Robotics · Sun Yat-sen University, China +2

  12. EgoPush: Egocentric Multi-Object Rearrangement for Mobile Robots via Constrained Teacher Observability

    Feb 20, 2026Boyuan An, Zhexiong Wang, Yipeng Wang +4Robotic ManipulationRobot Learning

    New York University

  13. ROCKET: Residual-Oriented Multi-Layer Alignment for Spatially-Aware Vision-Language-Action Models

    Feb 20, 2026Guoheng Sun, Tingting Du, Kaixi Feng +6Vision-Language-Action ModelsVision-Language Alignment

    University of Maryland, College Park · University of Wisconsin, Madison · City University of Hong Kong +1

  14. When Vision Overrides Language: Evaluating and Mitigating Counterfactual Failures in VLAs

    Feb 19, 2026Yu Fang, Yuchun Feng, Dong Jing +5VLM RobustnessCounterfactual Evaluation of VLMs

    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  15. MALLVI: A Multi-Agent Framework for Integrated Generalized Robotics Manipulation

    Feb 18, 2026Mehrshad Taji, Arad Mahdinezhad Kashani, Iman Ahmadi +3Large Language Model-Based Robot PlanningRobotic Manipulation

    Department of Electrical Engineering Sharif University of Technology

  16. SimToolReal: An Object-Centric Policy for Zero-Shot Dexterous Tool Manipulation

    Feb 18, 2026Kushal Kedia, Tyler Ga Wei Lum, Jeannette Bohg +1Zero-Shot Robotic ManipulationRobot Skill Learning

    Cornell University · Stanford University

  17. EgoScale: Scaling Dexterous Manipulation with Diverse Egocentric Human Data

    Feb 18, 2026Ruijie Zheng, Dantong Niu, Yuqi Xie +12Robotic ManipulationRobot Learning

    NVIDIA · University of California, Berkeley · University of Maryland

  18. Learning Physics from Pretrained Video Models: A Multimodal Continuous and Sequential World Interaction Models for Robotic Manipulation

    Feb 18, 2026Zijian Song, Qichang Li, Sihan Qin +4Robotic ManipulationWorld Models for Robotics

    Sun Yat-sen University · X-Era AI Lab · Guangdong University of Technology +1

  19. ICP-Based Pallet Tracking for Unloading on Inclined Surfaces by Autonomous Forklifts

    Feb 18, 2026Takuro Kato, Mitsuharu MorisawaIndustrial RoboticsRobotic Manipulation

    T.Kato and M.Morisawa are with TICO-AIST Cooperative Research Laboratory for Advanced Logistics, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Japan.

  20. Dex4D: Task-Agnostic Point Track Policy for Zero-Shot Dexterous Manipulation

    Feb 17, 2026Yuxuan Kuang, Sungjae Park, Katerina Fragkiadaki +1Robotic ManipulationRobot Skill Learning

    Carnegie Mellon University

  21. Selective Perception for Robot: Task-Aware Attention in Multimodal VLA

    Feb 17, 2026Young-Chae Son, Jung-Woo Lee, Yoon-Ji Choi +2Efficient VLA ModelsVision-Language-Action Models

    Dongguk University

  22. Affordance Transfer Across Object Instances via Semantically Anchored Functional Map

    Feb 16, 2026Xiaoxiang Dong, Weiming ZhiFunctional Maps3D Shape Matching

    Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. · School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, Australia. · Australian Centre for Robotics, The University of Sydney, Australia. +1

  23. TWISTED-RL: Hierarchical Skilled Agents for Knot-Tying without Human Demonstrations

    Feb 16, 2026Guy Freund, Tom Jurgenson, Matan Sudry +1Robotic ManipulationRobot Skill Learning

    Reichman University · Technion – Israel Institute of Technology · The University of Texas at Austin

  24. A Soft Wrist with Anisotropic and Selectable Stiffness for Robust Robot Learning in Contact-rich Manipulation

    Feb 16, 2026Steven Oh, Tomoya Takahashi, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez +2Soft RoboticsRobotic Manipulation

    OMRON SINIC X Corp., Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-0033, Japan.

  25. AdaptManip: Learning Adaptive Whole-Body Object Lifting and Delivery with Online Recurrent State Estimation

    Feb 16, 2026Morgan Byrd, Donghoon Baek, Kartik Garg +5RL for RoboticsRobotic Manipulation

    Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30308, USA · Georgia Tech Research Institute, Atlanta, GA, 30308, USA

  26. FlowHOI: Flow-based Semantics-Grounded Generation of Hand-Object Interactions for Dexterous Robot Manipulation

    Feb 13, 2026Huajian Zeng, Lingyun Chen, Jiaqi Yang +4HOI GenerationRobotic Manipulation

    Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi, UAE. · Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany. · National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore. +1

  27. UniManip: Open-World Robotic Manipulation via Agentic Operational Graphs

    Feb 13, 2026Haichao Liu, Yuanjiang Xue, Yuheng Zhou +5Robotic ManipulationLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

    School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, China

  28. Beyond Imitation: Reinforcement Learning-Based Sim-Real Co-Training for VLA Models

    Feb 13, 2026Liangzhi Shi, Shuaihang Chen, Feng Gao +8VLA Model TrainingSim-to-Real Transfer

    Tsinghua University · Shanghai AI Laboratory · Harbin Institute of Technology +3

  29. Learning Force-Regulated Robotic Manipulation with a Low-Cost Tactile-Force-Controlled Gripper

    Feb 10, 2026Xuhui Kang, Tongxuan Tian, Sung-Wook Lee +3Robot Policy LearningRobotic Grasping

    Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA. · Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.

  30. MVISTA-4D: View-Consistent 4D World Model with Test-Time Action Inference for Robotic Manipulation

    Feb 10, 2026Jiaxu Wang, Yicheng Jiang, Tianlun He +7World Models for Robotics4D Scene Generation

    MMLab, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong · The University of Hong Kong +2