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arxiv 2506.13762 v1 pith:DWAGU6BY submitted 2025-06-16 cs.RO cs.CV

Touch begins where vision ends: Generalizable policies for contact-rich manipulation

classification cs.RO cs.CV
keywords vitalcontact-richmanipulationpolicieslearninglocalrobusttasks
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Data-driven approaches struggle with precise manipulation; imitation learning requires many hard-to-obtain demonstrations, while reinforcement learning yields brittle, non-generalizable policies. We introduce VisuoTactile Local (ViTaL) policy learning, a framework that solves fine-grained manipulation tasks by decomposing them into two phases: a reaching phase, where a vision-language model (VLM) enables scene-level reasoning to localize the object of interest, and a local interaction phase, where a reusable, scene-agnostic ViTaL policy performs contact-rich manipulation using egocentric vision and tactile sensing. This approach is motivated by the observation that while scene context varies, the low-level interaction remains consistent across task instances. By training local policies once in a canonical setting, they can generalize via a localize-then-execute strategy. ViTaL achieves around 90% success on contact-rich tasks in unseen environments and is robust to distractors. ViTaL's effectiveness stems from three key insights: (1) foundation models for segmentation enable training robust visual encoders via behavior cloning; (2) these encoders improve the generalizability of policies learned using residual RL; and (3) tactile sensing significantly boosts performance in contact-rich tasks. Ablation studies validate each of these insights, and we demonstrate that ViTaL integrates well with high-level VLMs, enabling robust, reusable low-level skills. Results and videos are available at https://vitalprecise.github.io.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. TouchWorld: A Predictive and Reactive Tactile Foundation Model for Dexterous Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    A hierarchical robot manipulation policy uses tactile sensing both as a predictive subgoal generator and as a high-frequency residual correction signal, achieving 65% success on six contact-rich dexterous tasks versus...

  2. Multi-Resolution Tactile Imitation Learning for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    MiTaS fuses multi-resolution tactile data from GelSight and Evetac sensors with vision using modality-specific stems and transformer fusion to condition flow-matching policies, reporting 80% average success on five co...

  3. From Reach to Insert: Tactile-Augmented Precision Assembly under Sub-Millimeter Tolerances

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A two-stage IL-RL method with tactile group sampling and a tactile critic achieves 67% success at 0.05 mm clearance while cutting max force by 60% and torque by 44%.

  4. FingerViP: Learning Real-World Dexterous Manipulation with Fingertip Visual Perception

    cs.RO 2026-04 conditional novelty 6.0

    FingerViP equips each finger with a miniature camera and trains a multi-view diffusion policy that achieves 80.8% success on real-world dexterous tasks previously limited by wrist-camera occlusion.

  5. Seeing Touch from Motion: A Unified Modality-Aware Visuo-Tactile Policy with Tactile Motion Correlation

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A visuo-tactile policy learning method that exploits tactile motion correlation for contact state distinction and Mixture-of-Transformers for cross-modal fusion.

  6. TacCoRL: Integrating Tactile Feedback into VLA via Simulation

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    TacCoRL integrates tactile feedback into VLA policies via real-aligned simulation co-training and RL, raising average success from 50% to 72.5% on four bimanual contact-rich tasks with direct real-robot transfer.