Daily Papers

Deep generative models have various content creation applications such as graphic design, e-commerce, and virtual Try-on. However, current works mainly focus on synthesizing realistic visual outputs, often ignoring other sensory modalities, such as touch, which limits physical interaction with users. In this work, we leverage deep generative models to create a multi-sensory experience where users can touch and see the synthesized object when sliding their fingers on a haptic surface. The main challenges lie in the significant scale discrepancy between vision and touch sensing and the lack of explicit mapping from touch sensing data to a haptic rendering device. To bridge this gap, we collect high-resolution tactile data with a GelSight sensor and create a new visuotactile clothing dataset. We then develop a conditional generative model that synthesizes both visual and tactile outputs from a single sketch. We evaluate our method regarding image quality and tactile rendering accuracy. Finally, we introduce a pipeline to render high-quality visual and tactile outputs on an electroadhesion-based haptic device for an immersive experience, allowing for challenging materials and editable sketch inputs.

Haptic displays play an important role in enhancing the sense of presence in VR and telepresence. Displaying the tactile properties of fabrics has potential in the fashion industry, but there are difficulties in dynamically displaying different types of tactile sensations while maintaining their flexible properties. The vibrotactile stimulation of fabrics is an important element in the tactile properties of fabrics, as it greatly affects the way a garment feels when rubbed against the skin. To dynamically change the vibrotactile stimuli, many studies have used mechanical actuators. However, when combined with fabric, the soft properties of the fabric are compromised by the stiffness of the actuator. In addition, because the vibration generated by such actuators is applied to a single point, it is not possible to provide a uniform tactile sensation over the entire surface of the fabric, resulting in an uneven tactile sensation. In this study, we propose a Pinching Tactile Display: a conductive cloth that changes the tactile sensation by controlling electrostatic adsorption. By controlling the voltage and frequency applied to the conductive cloth, different tactile sensations can be dynamically generated. This makes it possible to create a tactile device in which tactile sensations are applied to the entire fabric while maintaining the thin and soft characteristics of the fabric. As a result, users could experiment with tactile sensations by picking up and rubbing the fabric in the same way they normally touch it. This mechanism has the potential for dynamic tactile transformation of soft materials.

We introduce DIFFTACTILE, a physics-based differentiable tactile simulation system designed to enhance robotic manipulation with dense and physically accurate tactile feedback. In contrast to prior tactile simulators which primarily focus on manipulating rigid bodies and often rely on simplified approximations to model stress and deformations of materials in contact, DIFFTACTILE emphasizes physics-based contact modeling with high fidelity, supporting simulations of diverse contact modes and interactions with objects possessing a wide range of material properties. Our system incorporates several key components, including a Finite Element Method (FEM)-based soft body model for simulating the sensing elastomer, a multi-material simulator for modeling diverse object types (such as elastic, elastoplastic, cables) under manipulation, a penalty-based contact model for handling contact dynamics. The differentiable nature of our system facilitates gradient-based optimization for both 1) refining physical properties in simulation using real-world data, hence narrowing the sim-to-real gap and 2) efficient learning of tactile-assisted grasping and contact-rich manipulation skills. Additionally, we introduce a method to infer the optical response of our tactile sensor to contact using an efficient pixel-based neural module. We anticipate that DIFFTACTILE will serve as a useful platform for studying contact-rich manipulations, leveraging the benefits of dense tactile feedback and differentiable physics. Code and supplementary materials are available at the project website https://difftactile.github.io/.

If human experience is any guide, operating effectively in unstructured environments -- like homes and offices -- requires robots to sense the forces during physical interaction. Yet, the lack of a versatile, accessible, and easily customizable tactile sensor has led to fragmented, sensor-specific solutions in robotic manipulation -- and in many cases, to force-unaware, sensorless approaches. With eFlesh, we bridge this gap by introducing a magnetic tactile sensor that is low-cost, easy to fabricate, and highly customizable. Building an eFlesh sensor requires only four components: a hobbyist 3D printer, off-the-shelf magnets (<$5), a CAD model of the desired shape, and a magnetometer circuit board. The sensor is constructed from tiled, parameterized microstructures, which allow for tuning the sensor's geometry and its mechanical response. We provide an open-source design tool that converts convex OBJ/STL files into 3D-printable STLs for fabrication. This modular design framework enables users to create application-specific sensors, and to adjust sensitivity depending on the task. Our sensor characterization experiments demonstrate the capabilities of eFlesh: contact localization RMSE of 0.5 mm, and force prediction RMSE of 0.27 N for normal force and 0.12 N for shear force. We also present a learned slip detection model that generalizes to unseen objects with 95% accuracy, and visuotactile control policies that improve manipulation performance by 40% over vision-only baselines -- achieving 91% average success rate for four precise tasks that require sub-mm accuracy for successful completion. All design files, code and the CAD-to-eFlesh STL conversion tool are open-sourced and available on https://e-flesh.com.

This paper presents a novel haptic device DeltaFinger designed to deliver the force of interaction with virtual objects by guiding user's finger with wearable delta mechanism. The developed interface is capable to deliver 3D force vector to the fingertip of the index finger of the user, allowing complex rendering of virtual reality (VR) environment. The developed device is able to produce the kinesthetic feedback up to 1.8 N in vertical projection and 0.9 N in horizontal projection without restricting the motion freedom of of the remaining fingers. The experimental results showed a sufficient precision in perception of force vector with DeltaFinger (mean force vector error of 0.6 rad). The proposed device potentially can be applied to VR communications, medicine, and navigation of the people with vision problems.

While tactile sensing is widely accepted as an important and useful sensing modality, its use pales in comparison to other sensory modalities like vision and proprioception. AnySkin addresses the critical challenges that impede the use of tactile sensing -- versatility, replaceability, and data reusability. Building on the simplistic design of ReSkin, and decoupling the sensing electronics from the sensing interface, AnySkin simplifies integration making it as straightforward as putting on a phone case and connecting a charger. Furthermore, AnySkin is the first uncalibrated tactile-sensor with cross-instance generalizability of learned manipulation policies. To summarize, this work makes three key contributions: first, we introduce a streamlined fabrication process and a design tool for creating an adhesive-free, durable and easily replaceable magnetic tactile sensor; second, we characterize slip detection and policy learning with the AnySkin sensor; and third, we demonstrate zero-shot generalization of models trained on one instance of AnySkin to new instances, and compare it with popular existing tactile solutions like DIGIT and ReSkin. Videos of experiments, fabrication details and design files can be found on https://any-skin.github.io/

Injury to the cervical spinal cord can cause quadriplegia, impairing muscle function in all four limbs. People with impaired hand function and mobility encounter significant difficulties in carrying out essential self-care and household tasks. Despite the impairment of their neural drive, their volitional myoelectric activity is often partially preserved. High-density electromyography (HDEMG) can detect this myoelectric activity, which can serve as control inputs to assistive devices. Previous HDEMG-controlled robotic interfaces have primarily been limited to controlling table-mounted robot arms. These have constrained reach capabilities. Instead, the ability to control mobile manipulators, which have no such workspace constraints, could allow individuals with quadriplegia to perform a greater variety of assistive tasks, thus restoring independence and reducing caregiver workload. In this study, we introduce a non-invasive wearable HDEMG interface with real-time myoelectric hand gesture recognition, enabling both coarse and fine control over the intricate mobility and manipulation functionalities of an 8 degree-of-freedom mobile manipulator. Our evaluation, involving 13 participants engaging in challenging self-care and household activities, demonstrates the potential of our wearable HDEMG system to profoundly enhance user independence by enabling non-invasive control of a mobile manipulator.

Effectively utilizing multi-sensory data is important for robots to generalize across diverse tasks. However, the heterogeneous nature of these modalities makes fusion challenging. Existing methods propose strategies to obtain comprehensively fused features but often ignore the fact that each modality requires different levels of attention at different manipulation stages. To address this, we propose a force-guided attention fusion module that adaptively adjusts the weights of visual and tactile features without human labeling. We also introduce a self-supervised future force prediction auxiliary task to reinforce the tactile modality, improve data imbalance, and encourage proper adjustment. Our method achieves an average success rate of 93% across three fine-grained, contactrich tasks in real-world experiments. Further analysis shows that our policy appropriately adjusts attention to each modality at different manipulation stages. The videos can be viewed at https://adaptac-dex.github.io/.

Tactile perception is a critical component of solving real-world manipulation tasks, but tactile sensors for manipulation have barriers to use such as fragility and cost. In this work, we engage a robust, low-cost tactile sensor, BeadSight, as an alternative to precise pre-calibrated sensors for a pretraining approach to manipulation. We show that tactile pretraining, even with a low-fidelity sensor as BeadSight, can improve an imitation learning agent's performance on complex manipulation tasks. We demonstrate this method against a baseline USB cable plugging task, previously achieved with a much higher precision GelSight sensor as the tactile input to pretraining. Our best BeadSight pretrained visuo-tactile agent completed the task with 70\% accuracy compared to 85\% for the best GelSight pretrained visuo-tactile agent, with vision-only inference for both.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of estimating 3D contact forces using vision-based tactile sensors. In particular, our goal is to estimate contact forces over a large range (up to 15 N) on any objects while generalizing across different vision-based tactile sensors. Thus, we collected a dataset of over 200K indentations using a robotic arm that pressed various indenters onto a GelSight Mini sensor mounted on a force sensor and then used the data to train a multi-head transformer for force regression. Strong generalization is achieved via accurate data collection and multi-objective optimization that leverages depth contact images. Despite being trained only on primitive shapes and textures, the regressor achieves a mean absolute error of 4\% on a dataset of unseen real-world objects. We further evaluate our approach's generalization capability to other GelSight mini and DIGIT sensors, and propose a reproducible calibration procedure for adapting the pre-trained model to other vision-based sensors. Furthermore, the method was evaluated on real-world tasks, including weighing objects and controlling the deformation of delicate objects, which relies on accurate force feedback. Project webpage: http://prg.cs.umd.edu/FeelAnyForce

Humans can accomplish complex contact-rich tasks using vision and touch, with highly reactive capabilities such as quick adjustments to environmental changes and adaptive control of contact forces; however, this remains challenging for robots. Existing visual imitation learning (IL) approaches rely on action chunking to model complex behaviors, which lacks the ability to respond instantly to real-time tactile feedback during the chunk execution. Furthermore, most teleoperation systems struggle to provide fine-grained tactile / force feedback, which limits the range of tasks that can be performed. To address these challenges, we introduce TactAR, a low-cost teleoperation system that provides real-time tactile feedback through Augmented Reality (AR), along with Reactive Diffusion Policy (RDP), a novel slow-fast visual-tactile imitation learning algorithm for learning contact-rich manipulation skills. RDP employs a two-level hierarchy: (1) a slow latent diffusion policy for predicting high-level action chunks in latent space at low frequency, (2) a fast asymmetric tokenizer for closed-loop tactile feedback control at high frequency. This design enables both complex trajectory modeling and quick reactive behavior within a unified framework. Through extensive evaluation across three challenging contact-rich tasks, RDP significantly improves performance compared to state-of-the-art visual IL baselines through rapid response to tactile / force feedback. Furthermore, experiments show that RDP is applicable across different tactile / force sensors. Code and videos are available on https://reactive-diffusion-policy.github.io.

Tactile feedback is critical for understanding the dynamics of both rigid and deformable objects in many manipulation tasks, such as non-prehensile manipulation and dense packing. We introduce an approach that combines visual and tactile sensing for robotic manipulation by learning a neural, tactile-informed dynamics model. Our proposed framework, RoboPack, employs a recurrent graph neural network to estimate object states, including particles and object-level latent physics information, from historical visuo-tactile observations and to perform future state predictions. Our tactile-informed dynamics model, learned from real-world data, can solve downstream robotics tasks with model-predictive control. We demonstrate our approach on a real robot equipped with a compliant Soft-Bubble tactile sensor on non-prehensile manipulation and dense packing tasks, where the robot must infer the physics properties of objects from direct and indirect interactions. Trained on only an average of 30 minutes of real-world interaction data per task, our model can perform online adaptation and make touch-informed predictions. Through extensive evaluations in both long-horizon dynamics prediction and real-world manipulation, our method demonstrates superior effectiveness compared to previous learning-based and physics-based simulation systems.

Safe yet stable grasping requires a robotic hand to apply sufficient force on the object to immobilize it while keeping it from getting damaged. Soft robotic hands have been proposed for safe grasping due to their passive compliance, but even such a hand can crush objects if the applied force is too high. Thus for safe grasping, regulating the grasping force is of uttermost importance even with soft hands. In this work, we present a force controlled soft hand and use it to achieve safe grasping. To this end, resistive force and bend sensors are integrated in a soft hand, and a data-driven calibration method is proposed to estimate contact interaction forces. Given the force readings, the pneumatic pressures are regulated using a proportional-integral controller to achieve desired force. The controller is experimentally evaluated and benchmarked by grasping easily deformable objects such as plastic and paper cups without neither dropping nor deforming them. Together, the results demonstrate that our force controlled soft hand can grasp deformable objects in a safe yet stable manner.

Cellular form and function emerge from complex mechanochemical systems within the cytoplasm. No systematic strategy currently exists to infer large-scale physical properties of a cell from its many molecular components. This is a significant obstacle to understanding biophysical processes such as cell adhesion and migration. Here, we develop a data-driven biophysical modeling approach to learn the mechanical behavior of adherent cells. We first train neural networks to predict forces generated by adherent cells from images of cytoskeletal proteins. Strikingly, experimental images of a single focal adhesion protein, such as zyxin, are sufficient to predict forces and generalize to unseen biological regimes. This protein field alone contains enough information to yield accurate predictions even if forces themselves are generated by many interacting proteins. We next develop two approaches - one explicitly constrained by physics, the other more agnostic - that help construct data-driven continuum models of cellular forces using this single focal adhesion field. Both strategies consistently reveal that cellular forces are encoded by two different length scales in adhesion protein distributions. Beyond adherent cell mechanics, our work serves as a case study for how to integrate neural networks in the construction of predictive phenomenological models in cell biology, even when little knowledge of the underlying microscopic mechanisms exist.

Learning from demonstrations has shown to be an effective approach to robotic manipulation, especially with the recently collected large-scale robot data with teleoperation systems. Building an efficient teleoperation system across diverse robot platforms has become more crucial than ever. However, there is a notable lack of cost-effective and user-friendly teleoperation systems for different end-effectors, e.g., anthropomorphic robot hands and grippers, that can operate across multiple platforms. To address this issue, we develop ACE, a cross-platform visual-exoskeleton system for low-cost dexterous teleoperation. Our system utilizes a hand-facing camera to capture 3D hand poses and an exoskeleton mounted on a portable base, enabling accurate real-time capture of both finger and wrist poses. Compared to previous systems, which often require hardware customization according to different robots, our single system can generalize to humanoid hands, arm-hands, arm-gripper, and quadruped-gripper systems with high-precision teleoperation. This enables imitation learning for complex manipulation tasks on diverse platforms.

Tactile sensing remains far less understood in neuroscience and less effective in artificial systems compared to more mature modalities such as vision and language. We bridge these gaps by introducing a novel Encoder-Attender-Decoder (EAD) framework to systematically explore the space of task-optimized temporal neural networks trained on realistic tactile input sequences from a customized rodent whisker-array simulator. We identify convolutional recurrent neural networks (ConvRNNs) as superior encoders to purely feedforward and state-space architectures for tactile categorization. Crucially, these ConvRNN-encoder-based EAD models achieve neural representations closely matching rodent somatosensory cortex, saturating the explainable neural variability and revealing a clear linear relationship between supervised categorization performance and neural alignment. Furthermore, contrastive self-supervised ConvRNN-encoder-based EADs, trained with tactile-specific augmentations, match supervised neural fits, serving as an ethologically-relevant, label-free proxy. For neuroscience, our findings highlight nonlinear recurrent processing as important for general-purpose tactile representations in somatosensory cortex, providing the first quantitative characterization of the underlying inductive biases in this system. For embodied AI, our results emphasize the importance of recurrent EAD architectures to handle realistic tactile inputs, along with tailored self-supervised learning methods for achieving robust tactile perception with the same type of sensors animals use to sense in unstructured environments.

Compliance is a useful parametrization of tactile information that humans often utilize in manipulation tasks. It can be used to inform low-level contact-rich actions or characterize objects at a high-level. In robotic manipulation, existing approaches to estimate compliance have struggled to generalize across object shape and material. Using camera-based tactile sensors, we present a novel approach to parametrize compliance through Young's modulus E. We evaluate our method over a novel dataset of 285 common objects, including a wide array of shapes and materials with Young's moduli ranging from 5.0 kPa to 250 GPa. Data is collected over automated parallel grasps of each object. Combining analytical and data-driven approaches, we develop a hybrid system using a multi-tower neural network to analyze a sequence of tactile images from grasping. This system is shown to estimate the Young's modulus of unseen objects within an order of magnitude at 74.2% accuracy across our dataset. This is a drastic improvement over a purely analytical baseline, which exhibits only 28.9% accuracy. Importantly, this estimation system performs irrespective of object geometry and demonstrates robustness across object materials. Thus, it could be applied in a general robotic manipulation setting to characterize unknown objects and inform decision-making, for instance to sort produce by ripeness.

This paper introduces DogSurf - a newapproach of using quadruped robots to help visually impaired people navigate in real world. The presented method allows the quadruped robot to detect slippery surfaces, and to use audio and haptic feedback to inform the user when to stop. A state-of-the-art GRU-based neural network architecture with mean accuracy of 99.925% was proposed for the task of multiclass surface classification for quadruped robots. A dataset was collected on a Unitree Go1 Edu robot. The dataset and code have been posted to the public domain.

For both humans and robots, the sense of touch, known as tactile sensing, is critical for performing contact-rich manipulation tasks. Three key challenges in robotic tactile sensing are 1) interpreting sensor signals, 2) generating sensor signals in novel scenarios, and 3) learning sensor-based policies. For visuotactile sensors, interpretation has been facilitated by their close relationship with vision sensors (e.g., RGB cameras). However, generation is still difficult, as visuotactile sensors typically involve contact, deformation, illumination, and imaging, all of which are expensive to simulate; in turn, policy learning has been challenging, as simulation cannot be leveraged for large-scale data collection. We present TacSL (taxel), a library for GPU-based visuotactile sensor simulation and learning. TacSL can be used to simulate visuotactile images and extract contact-force distributions over 200times faster than the prior state-of-the-art, all within the widely-used Isaac Gym simulator. Furthermore, TacSL provides a learning toolkit containing multiple sensor models, contact-intensive training environments, and online/offline algorithms that can facilitate policy learning for sim-to-real applications. On the algorithmic side, we introduce a novel online reinforcement-learning algorithm called asymmetric actor-critic distillation (\sysName), designed to effectively and efficiently learn tactile-based policies in simulation that can transfer to the real world. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our library and algorithms by evaluating the benefits of distillation and multimodal sensing for contact-rich manip ulation tasks, and most critically, performing sim-to-real transfer. Supplementary videos and results are at https://iakinola23.github.io/tacsl/.

We propose a neural physics system for real-time, interactive fluid simulations. Traditional physics-based methods, while accurate, are computationally intensive and suffer from latency issues. Recent machine-learning methods reduce computational costs while preserving fidelity; yet most still fail to satisfy the latency constraints for real-time use and lack support for interactive applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel hybrid method that integrates numerical simulation, neural physics, and generative control. Our neural physics jointly pursues low-latency simulation and high physical fidelity by employing a fallback safeguard to classical numerical solvers. Furthermore, we develop a diffusion-based controller that is trained using a reverse modeling strategy to generate external dynamic force fields for fluid manipulation. Our system demonstrates robust performance across diverse 2D/3D scenarios, material types, and obstacle interactions, achieving real-time simulations at high frame rates (11~29% latency) while enabling fluid control guided by user-friendly freehand sketches. We present a significant step towards practical, controllable, and physically plausible fluid simulations for real-time interactive applications. We promise to release both models and data upon acceptance.

High-resolution tactile sensors have become critical for embodied perception and robotic manipulation. However, a key challenge in the field is the lack of transferability between sensors due to design and manufacturing variations, which result in significant differences in tactile signals. This limitation hinders the ability to transfer models or knowledge learned from one sensor to another. To address this, we introduce a novel method for extracting Sensor-Invariant Tactile Representations (SITR), enabling zero-shot transfer across optical tactile sensors. Our approach utilizes a transformer-based architecture trained on a diverse dataset of simulated sensor designs, allowing it to generalize to new sensors in the real world with minimal calibration. Experimental results demonstrate the method's effectiveness across various tactile sensing applications, facilitating data and model transferability for future advancements in the field.

Contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments often require both haptic and visual feedback. However, it is non-trivial to manually design a robot controller that combines modalities with very different characteristics. While deep reinforcement learning has shown success in learning control policies for high-dimensional inputs, these algorithms are generally intractable to deploy on real robots due to sample complexity. We use self-supervision to learn a compact and multimodal representation of our sensory inputs, which can then be used to improve the sample efficiency of our policy learning. We evaluate our method on a peg insertion task, generalizing over different geometry, configurations, and clearances, while being robust to external perturbations. Results for simulated and real robot experiments are presented.

Humans rely on their visual and tactile senses to develop a comprehensive 3D understanding of their physical environment. Recently, there has been a growing interest in exploring and manipulating objects using data-driven approaches that utilise high-resolution vision-based tactile sensors. However, 3D shape reconstruction using tactile sensing has lagged behind visual shape reconstruction because of limitations in existing techniques, including the inability to generalise over unseen shapes, the absence of real-world testing, and limited expressive capacity imposed by discrete representations. To address these challenges, we propose TouchSDF, a Deep Learning approach for tactile 3D shape reconstruction that leverages the rich information provided by a vision-based tactile sensor and the expressivity of the implicit neural representation DeepSDF. Our technique consists of two components: (1) a Convolutional Neural Network that maps tactile images into local meshes representing the surface at the touch location, and (2) an implicit neural function that predicts a signed distance function to extract the desired 3D shape. This combination allows TouchSDF to reconstruct smooth and continuous 3D shapes from tactile inputs in simulation and real-world settings, opening up research avenues for robust 3D-aware representations and improved multimodal perception in robotics. Code and supplementary material are available at: https://touchsdf.github.io/

Tactile sensing is one of the modalities humans rely on heavily to perceive the world. Working with vision, this modality refines local geometry structure, measures deformation at the contact area, and indicates the hand-object contact state. With the availability of open-source tactile sensors such as DIGIT, research on visual-tactile learning is becoming more accessible and reproducible. Leveraging this tactile sensor, we propose a novel visual-tactile in-hand object reconstruction framework VTacO, and extend it to VTacOH for hand-object reconstruction. Since our method can support both rigid and deformable object reconstruction, no existing benchmarks are proper for the goal. We propose a simulation environment, VT-Sim, which supports generating hand-object interaction for both rigid and deformable objects. With VT-Sim, we generate a large-scale training dataset and evaluate our method on it. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can outperform the previous baseline methods qualitatively and quantitatively. Finally, we directly apply our model trained in simulation to various real-world test cases, which display qualitative results. Codes, models, simulation environment, and datasets are available at https://sites.google.com/view/vtaco/.

Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less severe underwater. However, it remains a challenge to design, fabricate, waterproof, model, and control underwater soft robotic systems. Furthermore, submersible robots usually do not have configurable components because of the need for sealed electronics and mechanical elements. This work presents the development of a modular and submersible soft robotic arm driven by hydraulic actuators which consists of mostly 3D printable parts which can be assembled or modified in a relatively short amount of time. Its modular design enables multiple shape configurations and easy swapping of soft actuators. As a first step to exploring machine learning control algorithms on this system, we also present preliminary forward and inverse kinematics models developed using deep neural networks.

Operating robots precisely and at high speeds has been a long-standing goal of robotics research. Balancing these competing demands is key to enabling the seamless collaboration of robots and humans and increasing task performance. However, traditional motor-driven systems often fall short in this balancing act. Due to their rigid and often heavy design exacerbated by positioning the motors into the joints, faster motions of such robots transfer high forces at impact. To enable precise and safe dynamic motions, we introduce a four degree-of-freedom~(DoF) tendon-driven robot arm. Tendons allow placing the actuation at the base to reduce the robot's inertia, which we show significantly reduces peak collision forces compared to conventional robots with motors placed near the joints. Pairing our robot with pneumatic muscles allows generating high forces and highly accelerated motions, while benefiting from impact resilience through passive compliance. Since tendons are subject to additional friction and hence prone to wear and tear, we validate the reliability of our robotic arm on various experiments, including long-term dynamic motions. We also demonstrate its ease of control by quantifying the nonlinearities of the system and the performance on a challenging dynamic table tennis task learned from scratch using reinforcement learning. We open-source the entire hardware design, which can be largely 3D printed, the control software, and a proprioceptive dataset of 25 days of diverse robot motions at webdav.tuebingen.mpg.de/pamy2.

Contact-rich manipulation tasks with stiff frictional elements like connector insertion are difficult to model with rigid-body simulators. In this work, we propose a new approach for modeling these environments by learning a quasi-static contact force model instead of a full simulator. Using a feature vector that contains information about the configuration and control, we find a linear mapping adequately captures the relationship between this feature vector and the sensed contact forces. A novel Linear Model Learning (LML) algorithm is used to solve for the globally optimal mapping in real time without any matrix inversions, resulting in an algorithm that runs in nearly constant time on a GPU as the model size increases. We validate the proposed approach for connector insertion both in simulation and hardware experiments, where the learned model is combined with an optimization-based controller to achieve smooth insertions in the presence of misalignments and uncertainty. Our website featuring videos, code, and more materials is available at https://model-based-plugging.github.io/.

Robotic grasp and manipulation taxonomies, inspired by observing human manipulation strategies, can provide key guidance for tasks ranging from robotic gripper design to the development of manipulation algorithms. The existing grasp and manipulation taxonomies, however, often assume object rigidity, which limits their ability to reason about the complex interactions in the robotic manipulation of deformable objects. Hence, to assist in tasks involving deformable objects, taxonomies need to capture more comprehensively the interactions inherent in deformable object manipulation. To this end, we introduce T-DOM, a taxonomy that analyses key aspects involved in the manipulation of deformable objects, such as robot motion, forces, prehensile and non-prehensile interactions and, for the first time, a detailed classification of object deformations. To evaluate T-DOM, we curate a dataset of ten tasks involving a variety of deformable objects, such as garments, ropes, and surgical gloves, as well as diverse types of deformations. We analyse the proposed tasks comparing the T-DOM taxonomy with previous well established manipulation taxonomies. Our analysis demonstrates that T-DOM can effectively distinguish between manipulation skills that were not identified in other taxonomies, across different deformable objects and manipulation actions, offering new categories to characterize a skill. The proposed taxonomy significantly extends past work, providing a more fine-grained classification that can be used to describe the robotic manipulation of deformable objects. This work establishes a foundation for advancing deformable object manipulation, bridging theoretical understanding and practical implementation in robotic systems.

We present formulation and open-source tools to achieve in-material model predictive control of sensor/actuator systems using learned forward kinematics and on-device computation. Microcontroller units (MCUs) that compute the prediction and control task while colocated with the sensors and actuators enable in-material untethered behaviors. In this approach, small parameter size neural network models learn forward kinematics offline. Our open-source compiler, nn4mc, generates code to offload these predictions onto MCUs. A Newton-Raphson solver then computes the control input in real time. We first benchmark this nonlinear control approach against a PID controller on a mass-spring-damper simulation. We then study experimental results on two experimental rigs with different sensing, actuation and computational hardware: a tendon-based platform with embedded LightLace sensors and a HASEL-based platform with magnetic sensors. Experimental results indicate effective high-bandwidth tracking of reference paths (greater than or equal to 120 Hz) with a small memory footprint (less than or equal to 6.4% of flash memory). The measured path following error does not exceed 2mm in the tendon-based platform. The simulated path following error does not exceed 1mm in the HASEL-based platform. The mean power consumption of this approach in an ARM Cortex-M4f device is 45.4 mW. This control approach is also compatible with Tensorflow Lite models and equivalent on-device code. In-material intelligence enables a new class of composites that infuse autonomy into structures and systems with refined artificial proprioception.

Generalizable humanoid loco-manipulation poses significant challenges, requiring coordinated whole-body control and precise, contact-rich object manipulation. To address this, this paper introduces HOMIE, a semi-autonomous teleoperation system that combines a reinforcement learning policy for body control mapped to a pedal, an isomorphic exoskeleton arm for arm control, and motion-sensing gloves for hand control, forming a unified cockpit to freely operate humanoids and establish a data flywheel. The policy incorporates novel designs, including an upper-body pose curriculum, a height-tracking reward, and symmetry utilization. These features enable the system to perform walking and squatting to specific heights while seamlessly adapting to arbitrary upper-body poses. The exoskeleton, by eliminating the reliance on inverse dynamics, delivers faster and more precise arm control. The gloves utilize Hall sensors instead of servos, allowing even compact devices to achieve 15 or more degrees of freedom and freely adapt to any model of dexterous hands. Compared to previous teleoperation systems, HOMIE stands out for its exceptional efficiency, completing tasks in half the time; its expanded working range, allowing users to freely reach high and low areas as well as interact with any objects; and its affordability, with a price of just $500. The system is fully open-source, demos and code can be found in our https://homietele.github.io/.

An electro-optic modulator offers the function of modulating the propagation of light in a material with electric field and enables seamless connection between electronics-based computing and photonics-based communication. The search for materials with large electro-optic coefficients and low optical loss is critical to increase the efficiency and minimize the size of electro-optic devices. We present a semi-empirical method to compute the electro-optic coefficients of ferroelectric materials by combining first-principles density-functional theory calculations with Landau-Devonshire phenomenological modeling. We apply the method to study the electro-optic constants, also called Pockels coefficients, of three paradigmatic ferroelectric oxides: BaTiO3, LiNbO3, and LiTaO3. We present their temperature-, frequency- and strain-dependent electro-optic tensors calculated using our method. The predicted electro-optic constants agree with the experimental results, where available, and provide benchmarks for experimental verification.

This paper presents T3: Transferable Tactile Transformers, a framework for tactile representation learning that scales across multi-sensors and multi-tasks. T3 is designed to overcome the contemporary issue that camera-based tactile sensing is extremely heterogeneous, i.e. sensors are built into different form factors, and existing datasets were collected for disparate tasks. T3 captures the shared latent information across different sensor-task pairings by constructing a shared trunk transformer with sensor-specific encoders and task-specific decoders. The pre-training of T3 utilizes a novel Foundation Tactile (FoTa) dataset, which is aggregated from several open-sourced datasets and it contains over 3 million data points gathered from 13 sensors and 11 tasks. FoTa is the largest and most diverse dataset in tactile sensing to date and it is made publicly available in a unified format. Across various sensors and tasks, experiments show that T3 pre-trained with FoTa achieved zero-shot transferability in certain sensor-task pairings, can be further fine-tuned with small amounts of domain-specific data, and its performance scales with bigger network sizes. T3 is also effective as a tactile encoder for long horizon contact-rich manipulation. Results from sub-millimeter multi-pin electronics insertion tasks show that T3 achieved a task success rate 25% higher than that of policies trained with tactile encoders trained from scratch, or 53% higher than without tactile sensing. Data, code, and model checkpoints are open-sourced at https://t3.alanz.info.

It is desired to equip robots with the capability of interacting with various soft materials as they are ubiquitous in the real world. While physics simulations are one of the predominant methods for data collection and robot training, simulating soft materials presents considerable challenges. Specifically, it is significantly more costly than simulating rigid objects in terms of simulation speed and storage requirements. These limitations typically restrict the scope of studies on soft materials to small and bounded areas, thereby hindering the learning of skills in broader spaces. To address this issue, we introduce UBSoft, a new simulation platform designed to support unbounded soft environments for robot skill acquisition. Our platform utilizes spatially adaptive resolution scales, where simulation resolution dynamically adjusts based on proximity to active robotic agents. Our framework markedly reduces the demand for extensive storage space and computation costs required for large-scale scenarios involving soft materials. We also establish a set of benchmark tasks in our platform, including both locomotion and manipulation tasks, and conduct experiments to evaluate the efficacy of various reinforcement learning algorithms and trajectory optimization techniques, both gradient-based and sampling-based. Preliminary results indicate that sampling-based trajectory optimization generally achieves better results for obtaining one trajectory to solve the task. Additionally, we conduct experiments in real-world environments to demonstrate that advancements made in our UBSoft simulator could translate to improved robot interactions with large-scale soft material. More videos can be found at https://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/ubsoft/.

A transhumeral prosthesis restores missing anatomical segments below the shoulder, including the hand. Active prostheses utilize real-valued, continuous sensor data to recognize patient target poses, or goals, and proactively move the artificial limb. Previous studies have examined how well the data collected in stationary poses, without considering the time steps, can help discriminate the goals. In this case study paper, we focus on using time series data from surface electromyography electrodes and kinematic sensors to sequentially recognize patients' goals. Our approach involves transforming the data into discrete events and training an existing process mining-based goal recognition system. Results from data collected in a virtual reality setting with ten subjects demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed goal recognition approach, which achieves significantly better precision and recall than the state-of-the-art machine learning techniques and is less confident when wrong, which is beneficial when approximating smoother movements of prostheses.

Autonomous wire harness assembly requires robots to manipulate complex branched cables with high precision and reliability. A key challenge in automating this process is predicting how these flexible and branched structures behave under manipulation. Without accurate predictions, it is difficult for robots to reliably plan or execute assembly operations. While existing research has made progress in modeling single-threaded Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs), extending these approaches to Branched Deformable Linear Objects (BDLOs) presents fundamental challenges. The junction points in BDLOs create complex force interactions and strain propagation patterns that cannot be adequately captured by simply connecting multiple single-DLO models. To address these challenges, this paper presents Differentiable discrete branched Elastic rods for modeling Furcated DLOs in real-Time (DEFT), a novel framework that combines a differentiable physics-based model with a learning framework to: 1) accurately model BDLO dynamics, including dynamic propagation at junction points and grasping in the middle of a BDLO, 2) achieve efficient computation for real-time inference, and 3) enable planning to demonstrate dexterous BDLO manipulation. A comprehensive series of real-world experiments demonstrates DEFT's efficacy in terms of accuracy, computational speed, and generalizability compared to state-of-the-art alternatives. Project page:https://roahmlab.github.io/DEFT/.

We present MidasTouch, a tactile perception system for online global localization of a vision-based touch sensor sliding on an object surface. This framework takes in posed tactile images over time, and outputs an evolving distribution of sensor pose on the object's surface, without the need for visual priors. Our key insight is to estimate local surface geometry with tactile sensing, learn a compact representation for it, and disambiguate these signals over a long time horizon. The backbone of MidasTouch is a Monte-Carlo particle filter, with a measurement model based on a tactile code network learned from tactile simulation. This network, inspired by LIDAR place recognition, compactly summarizes local surface geometries. These generated codes are efficiently compared against a precomputed tactile codebook per-object, to update the pose distribution. We further release the YCB-Slide dataset of real-world and simulated forceful sliding interactions between a vision-based tactile sensor and standard YCB objects. While single-touch localization can be inherently ambiguous, we can quickly localize our sensor by traversing salient surface geometries. Project page: https://suddhu.github.io/midastouch-tactile/

Ensuring safety is of paramount importance in physical human-robot interaction applications. This requires both adherence to safety constraints defined on the system state, as well as guaranteeing compliant behavior of the robot. If the underlying dynamical system is known exactly, the former can be addressed with the help of control barrier functions. The incorporation of elastic actuators in the robot's mechanical design can address the latter requirement. However, this elasticity can increase the complexity of the resulting system, leading to unmodeled dynamics, such that control barrier functions cannot directly ensure safety. In this paper, we mitigate this issue by learning the unknown dynamics using Gaussian process regression. By employing the model in a feedback linearizing control law, the safety conditions resulting from control barrier functions can be robustified to take into account model errors, while remaining feasible. In order to enforce them on-line, we formulate the derived safety conditions in the form of a second-order cone program. We demonstrate our proposed approach with simulations on a two-degree-of-freedom planar robot with elastic joints.

Real-world household tasks present significant challenges for mobile manipulation robots. An analysis of existing robotics benchmarks reveals that successful task performance hinges on three key whole-body control capabilities: bimanual coordination, stable and precise navigation, and extensive end-effector reachability. Achieving these capabilities requires careful hardware design, but the resulting system complexity further complicates visuomotor policy learning. To address these challenges, we introduce the BEHAVIOR Robot Suite (BRS), a comprehensive framework for whole-body manipulation in diverse household tasks. Built on a bimanual, wheeled robot with a 4-DoF torso, BRS integrates a cost-effective whole-body teleoperation interface for data collection and a novel algorithm for learning whole-body visuomotor policies. We evaluate BRS on five challenging household tasks that not only emphasize the three core capabilities but also introduce additional complexities, such as long-range navigation, interaction with articulated and deformable objects, and manipulation in confined spaces. We believe that BRS's integrated robotic embodiment, data collection interface, and learning framework mark a significant step toward enabling real-world whole-body manipulation for everyday household tasks. BRS is open-sourced at https://behavior-robot-suite.github.io/

Imitation learning has demonstrated significant potential in performing high-precision manipulation tasks using visual feedback. However, it is common practice in imitation learning for cameras to be fixed in place, resulting in issues like occlusion and limited field of view. Furthermore, cameras are often placed in broad, general locations, without an effective viewpoint specific to the robot's task. In this work, we investigate the utility of active vision (AV) for imitation learning and manipulation, in which, in addition to the manipulation policy, the robot learns an AV policy from human demonstrations to dynamically change the robot's camera viewpoint to obtain better information about its environment and the given task. We introduce AV-ALOHA, a new bimanual teleoperation robot system with AV, an extension of the ALOHA 2 robot system, incorporating an additional 7-DoF robot arm that only carries a stereo camera and is solely tasked with finding the best viewpoint. This camera streams stereo video to an operator wearing a virtual reality (VR) headset, allowing the operator to control the camera pose using head and body movements. The system provides an immersive teleoperation experience, with bimanual first-person control, enabling the operator to dynamically explore and search the scene and simultaneously interact with the environment. We conduct imitation learning experiments of our system both in real-world and in simulation, across a variety of tasks that emphasize viewpoint planning. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of human-guided AV for imitation learning, showing significant improvements over fixed cameras in tasks with limited visibility. Project website: https://soltanilara.github.io/av-aloha/

We present DexUMI - a data collection and policy learning framework that uses the human hand as the natural interface to transfer dexterous manipulation skills to various robot hands. DexUMI includes hardware and software adaptations to minimize the embodiment gap between the human hand and various robot hands. The hardware adaptation bridges the kinematics gap using a wearable hand exoskeleton. It allows direct haptic feedback in manipulation data collection and adapts human motion to feasible robot hand motion. The software adaptation bridges the visual gap by replacing the human hand in video data with high-fidelity robot hand inpainting. We demonstrate DexUMI's capabilities through comprehensive real-world experiments on two different dexterous robot hand hardware platforms, achieving an average task success rate of 86%.

We present Bi-LAT, a novel imitation learning framework that unifies bilateral control with natural language processing to achieve precise force modulation in robotic manipulation. Bi-LAT leverages joint position, velocity, and torque data from leader-follower teleoperation while also integrating visual and linguistic cues to dynamically adjust applied force. By encoding human instructions such as "softly grasp the cup" or "strongly twist the sponge" through a multimodal Transformer-based model, Bi-LAT learns to distinguish nuanced force requirements in real-world tasks. We demonstrate Bi-LAT's performance in (1) unimanual cup-stacking scenario where the robot accurately modulates grasp force based on language commands, and (2) bimanual sponge-twisting task that requires coordinated force control. Experimental results show that Bi-LAT effectively reproduces the instructed force levels, particularly when incorporating SigLIP among tested language encoders. Our findings demonstrate the potential of integrating natural language cues into imitation learning, paving the way for more intuitive and adaptive human-robot interaction. For additional material, please visit: https://mertcookimg.github.io/bi-lat/

We address the challenge of developing a generalizable neural tracking controller for dexterous manipulation from human references. This controller aims to manage a dexterous robot hand to manipulate diverse objects for various purposes defined by kinematic human-object interactions. Developing such a controller is complicated by the intricate contact dynamics of dexterous manipulation and the need for adaptivity, generalizability, and robustness. Current reinforcement learning and trajectory optimization methods often fall short due to their dependence on task-specific rewards or precise system models. We introduce an approach that curates large-scale successful robot tracking demonstrations, comprising pairs of human references and robot actions, to train a neural controller. Utilizing a data flywheel, we iteratively enhance the controller's performance, as well as the number and quality of successful tracking demonstrations. We exploit available tracking demonstrations and carefully integrate reinforcement learning and imitation learning to boost the controller's performance in dynamic environments. At the same time, to obtain high-quality tracking demonstrations, we individually optimize per-trajectory tracking by leveraging the learned tracking controller in a homotopy optimization method. The homotopy optimization, mimicking chain-of-thought, aids in solving challenging trajectory tracking problems to increase demonstration diversity. We showcase our success by training a generalizable neural controller and evaluating it in both simulation and real world. Our method achieves over a 10% improvement in success rates compared to leading baselines. The project website with animated results is available at https://meowuu7.github.io/DexTrack/.

We present Vision in Action (ViA), an active perception system for bimanual robot manipulation. ViA learns task-relevant active perceptual strategies (e.g., searching, tracking, and focusing) directly from human demonstrations. On the hardware side, ViA employs a simple yet effective 6-DoF robotic neck to enable flexible, human-like head movements. To capture human active perception strategies, we design a VR-based teleoperation interface that creates a shared observation space between the robot and the human operator. To mitigate VR motion sickness caused by latency in the robot's physical movements, the interface uses an intermediate 3D scene representation, enabling real-time view rendering on the operator side while asynchronously updating the scene with the robot's latest observations. Together, these design elements enable the learning of robust visuomotor policies for three complex, multi-stage bimanual manipulation tasks involving visual occlusions, significantly outperforming baseline systems.

Bimanual dexterous manipulation is a critical yet underexplored area in robotics. Its high-dimensional action space and inherent task complexity present significant challenges for policy learning, and the limited task diversity in existing benchmarks hinders general-purpose skill development. Existing approaches largely depend on reinforcement learning, often constrained by intricately designed reward functions tailored to a narrow set of tasks. In this work, we present a novel approach for efficiently learning diverse bimanual dexterous skills from abundant human demonstrations. Specifically, we introduce BiDexHD, a framework that unifies task construction from existing bimanual datasets and employs teacher-student policy learning to address all tasks. The teacher learns state-based policies using a general two-stage reward function across tasks with shared behaviors, while the student distills the learned multi-task policies into a vision-based policy. With BiDexHD, scalable learning of numerous bimanual dexterous skills from auto-constructed tasks becomes feasible, offering promising advances toward universal bimanual dexterous manipulation. Our empirical evaluation on the TACO dataset, spanning 141 tasks across six categories, demonstrates a task fulfillment rate of 74.59% on trained tasks and 51.07% on unseen tasks, showcasing the effectiveness and competitive zero-shot generalization capabilities of BiDexHD. For videos and more information, visit our project page https://sites.google.com/view/bidexhd.

We introduce SonicSense, a holistic design of hardware and software to enable rich robot object perception through in-hand acoustic vibration sensing. While previous studies have shown promising results with acoustic sensing for object perception, current solutions are constrained to a handful of objects with simple geometries and homogeneous materials, single-finger sensing, and mixing training and testing on the same objects. SonicSense enables container inventory status differentiation, heterogeneous material prediction, 3D shape reconstruction, and object re-identification from a diverse set of 83 real-world objects. Our system employs a simple but effective heuristic exploration policy to interact with the objects as well as end-to-end learning-based algorithms to fuse vibration signals to infer object properties. Our framework underscores the significance of in-hand acoustic vibration sensing in advancing robot tactile perception.

Three-dimensional (3D) applications have come to every corner of life. We present 3DTouch, a novel 3D wearable input device worn on the fingertip for interacting with 3D applications. 3DTouch is self-contained, and designed to universally work on various 3D platforms. The device employs touch input for the benefits of passive haptic feedback, and movement stability. Moreover, with touch interaction, 3DTouch is conceptually less fatiguing to use over many hours than 3D spatial input devices such as Kinect. Our approach relies on relative positioning technique using an optical laser sensor and a 9-DOF inertial measurement unit. We implemented a set of 3D interaction techniques including selection, translation, and rotation using 3DTouch. An evaluation also demonstrates the device's tracking accuracy of 1.10 mm and 2.33 degrees for subtle touch interaction in 3D space. With 3DTouch project, we would like to provide an input device that reduces the gap between 3D applications and users.

Recent advances in large-scale machine learning have produced high-capacity foundation models capable of adapting to a broad array of downstream tasks. While such models hold great promise for robotics, the prevailing paradigm still portrays robots as single, autonomous decision-makers, performing tasks like manipulation and navigation, with limited human involvement. However, a large class of real-world robotic systems, including wearable robotics (e.g., prostheses, orthoses, exoskeletons), teleoperation, and neural interfaces, are semiautonomous, and require ongoing interactive coordination with human partners, challenging single-agent assumptions. In this position paper, we argue that robot foundation models must evolve to an interactive multi-agent perspective in order to handle the complexities of real-time human-robot co-adaptation. We propose a generalizable, neuroscience-inspired architecture encompassing four modules: (1) a multimodal sensing module informed by sensorimotor integration principles, (2) an ad-hoc teamwork model reminiscent of joint-action frameworks in cognitive science, (3) a predictive world belief model grounded in internal model theories of motor control, and (4) a memory/feedback mechanism that echoes concepts of Hebbian and reinforcement-based plasticity. Although illustrated through the lens of cyborg systems, where wearable devices and human physiology are inseparably intertwined, the proposed framework is broadly applicable to robots operating in semi-autonomous or interactive contexts. By moving beyond single-agent designs, our position emphasizes how foundation models in robotics can achieve a more robust, personalized, and anticipatory level of performance.

Imitation learning from human demonstrations has shown impressive performance in robotics. However, most results focus on table-top manipulation, lacking the mobility and dexterity necessary for generally useful tasks. In this work, we develop a system for imitating mobile manipulation tasks that are bimanual and require whole-body control. We first present Mobile ALOHA, a low-cost and whole-body teleoperation system for data collection. It augments the ALOHA system with a mobile base, and a whole-body teleoperation interface. Using data collected with Mobile ALOHA, we then perform supervised behavior cloning and find that co-training with existing static ALOHA datasets boosts performance on mobile manipulation tasks. With 50 demonstrations for each task, co-training can increase success rates by up to 90%, allowing Mobile ALOHA to autonomously complete complex mobile manipulation tasks such as sauteing and serving a piece of shrimp, opening a two-door wall cabinet to store heavy cooking pots, calling and entering an elevator, and lightly rinsing a used pan using a kitchen faucet. Project website: https://mobile-aloha.github.io

While significant research progress has been made in robot learning for control, unique challenges arise when simultaneously co-optimizing morphology. Existing work has typically been tailored for particular environments or representations. In order to more fully understand inherent design and performance tradeoffs and accelerate the development of new breeds of soft robots, a comprehensive virtual platform with well-established tasks, environments, and evaluation metrics is needed. In this work, we introduce SoftZoo, a soft robot co-design platform for locomotion in diverse environments. SoftZoo supports an extensive, naturally-inspired material set, including the ability to simulate environments such as flat ground, desert, wetland, clay, ice, snow, shallow water, and ocean. Further, it provides a variety of tasks relevant for soft robotics, including fast locomotion, agile turning, and path following, as well as differentiable design representations for morphology and control. Combined, these elements form a feature-rich platform for analysis and development of soft robot co-design algorithms. We benchmark prevalent representations and co-design algorithms, and shed light on 1) the interplay between environment, morphology, and behavior; 2) the importance of design space representations; 3) the ambiguity in muscle formation and controller synthesis; and 4) the value of differentiable physics. We envision that SoftZoo will serve as a standard platform and template an approach toward the development of novel representations and algorithms for co-designing soft robots' behavioral and morphological intelligence.

We describe a mobile manipulation hardware and software system capable of autonomously performing complex human-level tasks in real homes, after being taught the task with a single demonstration from a person in virtual reality. This is enabled by a highly capable mobile manipulation robot, whole-body task space hybrid position/force control, teaching of parameterized primitives linked to a robust learned dense visual embeddings representation of the scene, and a task graph of the taught behaviors. We demonstrate the robustness of the approach by presenting results for performing a variety of tasks, under different environmental conditions, in multiple real homes. Our approach achieves 85% overall success rate on three tasks that consist of an average of 45 behaviors each.

Biomimetic, dexterous robotic hands have the potential to replicate much of the tasks that a human can do, and to achieve status as a general manipulation platform. Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks have achieved remarkable performance in quadrupedal locomotion and dexterous manipulation tasks. Combined with GPU-based highly parallelized simulations capable of simulating thousands of robots in parallel, RL-based controllers have become more scalable and approachable. However, in order to bring RL-trained policies to the real world, we require training frameworks that output policies that can work with physical actuators and sensors as well as a hardware platform that can be manufactured with accessible materials yet is robust enough to run interactive policies. This work introduces the biomimetic tendon-driven Faive Hand and its system architecture, which uses tendon-driven rolling contact joints to achieve a 3D printable, robust high-DoF hand design. We model each element of the hand and integrate it into a GPU simulation environment to train a policy with RL, and achieve zero-shot transfer of a dexterous in-hand sphere rotation skill to the physical robot hand.

Human motion generation holds significant promise in fields such as animation, film production, and robotics. However, existing methods often fail to produce physically plausible movements that adhere to biomechanical principles. While recent autoregressive and diffusion models have improved visual quality, they frequently overlook essential biodynamic features, such as muscle activation patterns and joint coordination, leading to motions that either violate physical laws or lack controllability. This paper introduces BioMoDiffuse, a novel biomechanics-aware diffusion framework that addresses these limitations. It features three key innovations: (1) A lightweight biodynamic network that integrates muscle electromyography (EMG) signals and kinematic features with acceleration constraints, (2) A physics-guided diffusion process that incorporates real-time biomechanical verification via modified Euler-Lagrange equations, and (3) A decoupled control mechanism that allows independent regulation of motion speed and semantic context. We also propose a set of comprehensive evaluation protocols that combines traditional metrics (FID, R-precision, etc.) with new biomechanical criteria (smoothness, foot sliding, floating, etc.). Our approach bridges the gap between data-driven motion synthesis and biomechanical authenticity, establishing new benchmarks for physically accurate motion generation.

It is well-known that inverse dynamics models can improve tracking performance in robot control. These models need to precisely capture the robot dynamics, which consist of well-understood components, e.g., rigid body dynamics, and effects that remain challenging to capture, e.g., stick-slip friction and mechanical flexibilities. Such effects exhibit hysteresis and partial observability, rendering them, particularly challenging to model. Hence, hybrid models, which combine a physical prior with data-driven approaches are especially well-suited in this setting. We present a novel hybrid model formulation that enables us to identify fully physically consistent inertial parameters of a rigid body dynamics model which is paired with a recurrent neural network architecture, allowing us to capture unmodeled partially observable effects using the network memory. We compare our approach against state-of-the-art inverse dynamics models on a 7 degree of freedom manipulator. Using data sets obtained through an optimal experiment design approach, we study the accuracy of offline torque prediction and generalization capabilities of joint learning methods. In control experiments on the real system, we evaluate the model as a feed-forward term for impedance control and show the feedback gains can be drastically reduced to achieve a given tracking accuracy.

This paper addresses the task of modeling Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs), such as ropes and cables, during dynamic motion over long time horizons. This task presents significant challenges due to the complex dynamics of DLOs. To address these challenges, this paper proposes differentiable Discrete Elastic Rods For deformable linear Objects with Real-time Modeling (DEFORM), a novel framework that combines a differentiable physics-based model with a learning framework to model DLOs accurately and in real-time. The performance of DEFORM is evaluated in an experimental setup involving two industrial robots and a variety of sensors. A comprehensive series of experiments demonstrate the efficacy of DEFORM in terms of accuracy, computational speed, and generalizability when compared to state-of-the-art alternatives. To further demonstrate the utility of DEFORM, this paper integrates it into a perception pipeline and illustrates its superior performance when compared to the state-of-the-art methods while tracking a DLO even in the presence of occlusions. Finally, this paper illustrates the superior performance of DEFORM when compared to state-of-the-art methods when it is applied to perform autonomous planning and control of DLOs. Project page: https://roahmlab.github.io/DEFORM/.

Tactile graphics are essential for providing access to visual information for the 43 million people globally living with vision loss. Traditional methods for creating these graphics are labor-intensive and cannot meet growing demand. We introduce TactileNet, the first comprehensive dataset and AI-driven framework for generating embossing-ready 2D tactile templates using text-to-image Stable Diffusion (SD) models. By integrating Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and DreamBooth, our method fine-tunes SD models to produce high-fidelity, guideline-compliant graphics while reducing computational costs. Quantitative evaluations with tactile experts show 92.86% adherence to accessibility standards. Structural fidelity analysis revealed near-human design similarity, with an SSIM of 0.538 between generated graphics and expert-designed tactile images. Notably, our method preserves object silhouettes better than human designs (SSIM = 0.259 vs. 0.215 for binary masks), addressing a key limitation of manual tactile abstraction. The framework scales to 32,000 images (7,050 high-quality) across 66 classes, with prompt editing enabling customizable outputs (e.g., adding or removing details). By automating the 2D template generation step-compatible with standard embossing workflows-TactileNet accelerates production while preserving design flexibility. This work demonstrates how AI can augment (not replace) human expertise to bridge the accessibility gap in education and beyond. Code, data, and models will be publicly released to foster further research.

Ultrasonic acoustic fields have recently been used to generate haptic effects on the human skin as well as to levitate small sub-wavelength size particles. Schlieren imaging and background-oriented schlieren techniques can be used for acoustic wave pattern and beam shape visualization. These techniques exploit variations in the refractive index of a propagation medium by applying refractive optics or cross-correlation algorithms of photographs of illuminated background patterns. Here both background-oriented and traditional schlieren systems are used to visualize the regions of the acoustic power involved in creating dynamic haptic sensations and dynamic levitation traps. We demonstrate for the first time the application of back-ground-oriented schlieren for imaging ultrasonic fields in air. We detail our imaging apparatus and present improved algorithms used to visualize these phenomena that we have produced using multiple phased arrays. Moreover, to improve imaging, we leverage an electronically controlled, high-output LED which is pulsed in synchrony with the ultrasonic carrier frequency.

Hand tracking is a critical component of natural user interactions in extended reality (XR) environments, including extended reality musical instruments (XRMIs). However, self-occlusion remains a significant challenge for vision-based hand tracking systems, leading to inaccurate results and degraded user experiences. In this paper, we propose a multimodal hand tracking system that combines vision-based hand tracking with surface electromyography (sEMG) data for finger joint angle estimation. We validate the effectiveness of our system through a series of hand pose tasks designed to cover a wide range of gestures, including those prone to self-occlusion. By comparing the performance of our multimodal system to a baseline vision-based tracking method, we demonstrate that our multimodal approach significantly improves tracking accuracy for several finger joints prone to self-occlusion. These findings suggest that our system has the potential to enhance XR experiences by providing more accurate and robust hand tracking, even in the presence of self-occlusion.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced general-purpose robotic manipulation by leveraging pretrained visual and linguistic representations. However, they struggle with contact-rich tasks that require fine-grained control involving force, especially under visual occlusion or dynamic uncertainty. To address these limitations, we propose ForceVLA, a novel end-to-end manipulation framework that treats external force sensing as a first-class modality within VLA systems. ForceVLA introduces FVLMoE, a force-aware Mixture-of-Experts fusion module that dynamically integrates pretrained visual-language embeddings with real-time 6-axis force feedback during action decoding. This enables context-aware routing across modality-specific experts, enhancing the robot's ability to adapt to subtle contact dynamics. We also introduce ForceVLA-Data, a new dataset comprising synchronized vision, proprioception, and force-torque signals across five contact-rich manipulation tasks. ForceVLA improves average task success by 23.2\% over strong pi_0-based baselines, achieving up to 80\% success in tasks such as plug insertion. Our approach highlights the importance of multimodal integration for dexterous manipulation and sets a new benchmark for physically intelligent robotic control. Code and data will be released at https://sites.google.com/view/forcevla2025.

We present ArrayBot, a distributed manipulation system consisting of a 16 times 16 array of vertically sliding pillars integrated with tactile sensors, which can simultaneously support, perceive, and manipulate the tabletop objects. Towards generalizable distributed manipulation, we leverage reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for the automatic discovery of control policies. In the face of the massively redundant actions, we propose to reshape the action space by considering the spatially local action patch and the low-frequency actions in the frequency domain. With this reshaped action space, we train RL agents that can relocate diverse objects through tactile observations only. Surprisingly, we find that the discovered policy can not only generalize to unseen object shapes in the simulator but also transfer to the physical robot without any domain randomization. Leveraging the deployed policy, we present abundant real-world manipulation tasks, illustrating the vast potential of RL on ArrayBot for distributed manipulation.

Replicating human--level dexterity remains a fundamental robotics challenge, requiring integrated solutions from mechatronic design to the control of high degree--of--freedom (DoF) robotic hands. While imitation learning shows promise in transferring human dexterity to robots, the efficacy of trained policies relies on the quality of human demonstration data. We bridge this gap with a hand--arm teleoperation system featuring: (1) a 20--DoF linkage--driven anthropomorphic robotic hand for biomimetic dexterity, and (2) an optimization--based motion retargeting for real--time, high--fidelity reproduction of intricate human hand motions and seamless hand--arm coordination. We validate the system via extensive empirical evaluations, including dexterous in-hand manipulation tasks and a long--horizon task requiring the organization of a cluttered makeup table randomly populated with nine objects. Experimental results demonstrate its intuitive teleoperation interface with real--time control and the ability to generate high--quality demonstration data. Please refer to the accompanying video for further details.

Molecular ferroelectric materials have attracted widespread attention due to their abundant chemical diversity, structural tunability, low synthesis temperature, and high flexibility. Meanwhile, the integration of molecular ferroelectric materials and Si is still challenging, while the fundamental understanding of the ferroelectric switching process is still lacking. Herein, we have successfully synthesized the imidazole perchlorate (ImClO4) single crystals and a series of high-quality highly-oriented thin films on a Si substrate. A high inverse piezoelectric coefficient (55.7 pm/V) is demonstrated for the thin films. Two types of domain bands can be observed (in the size of a few microns): type-I band tilts ~60{\deg} with respect to the horizontal axis, while the type-II band is perpendicular to the horizontal axis. Most of the domain walls (DWs) are 180{\deg} DWs for the two bands, while some 109{\deg} DWs can also be observed. Interestingly, the DWs in type-I band are curved, charged domain walls; while the 180{\deg} DWs in type-II band are straight, noncharged domain walls. After applying +20 V for 5 s through a PFM tip, the 180{\deg} DWs in type-I band shrink first, then disconnect from the band boundary, forming a needle-like domain with a size of ~100 nm. The needle-like domain will extend toward the band boundary after an inverse bias is applied (-20 V), and expand along the band boundary after touching the boundary. Whereas for the type-II domain band, the 180{\deg} DWs are more mobile than the 109{\deg} domain walls, which displaces ~500 nm after applying +20 V. While such displacement is much shorter after the application of a negative bias for the same duration, starting from the positively poled sample. We hope to spur further interest in the on-chip design of the molecular ferroelectrics based electronic devices.

Vision-based teleoperation offers the possibility to endow robots with human-level intelligence to physically interact with the environment, while only requiring low-cost camera sensors. However, current vision-based teleoperation systems are designed and engineered towards a particular robot model and deploy environment, which scales poorly as the pool of the robot models expands and the variety of the operating environment increases. In this paper, we propose AnyTeleop, a unified and general teleoperation system to support multiple different arms, hands, realities, and camera configurations within a single system. Although being designed to provide great flexibility to the choice of simulators and real hardware, our system can still achieve great performance. For real-world experiments, AnyTeleop can outperform a previous system that was designed for a specific robot hardware with a higher success rate, using the same robot. For teleoperation in simulation, AnyTeleop leads to better imitation learning performance, compared with a previous system that is particularly designed for that simulator. Project page: http://anyteleop.com/.

Closed-loop brain stimulation refers to capturing neurophysiological measures such as electroencephalography (EEG), quickly identifying neural events of interest, and producing auditory, magnetic or electrical stimulation so as to interact with brain processes precisely. It is a promising new method for fundamental neuroscience and perhaps for clinical applications such as restoring degraded memory function; however, existing tools are expensive, cumbersome, and offer limited experimental flexibility. In this article, we propose the Portiloop, a deep learning-based, portable and low-cost closed-loop stimulation system able to target specific brain oscillations. We first document open-hardware implementations that can be constructed from commercially available components. We also provide a fast, lightweight neural network model and an exploration algorithm that automatically optimizes the model hyperparameters to the desired brain oscillation. Finally, we validate the technology on a challenging test case of real-time sleep spindle detection, with results comparable to off-line expert performance on the Massive Online Data Annotation spindle dataset (MODA; group consensus). Software and plans are available to the community as an open science initiative to encourage further development and advance closed-loop neuroscience research.

UniT is a novel approach to tactile representation learning, using VQVAE to learn a compact latent space and serve as the tactile representation. It uses tactile images obtained from a single simple object to train the representation with transferability and generalizability. This tactile representation can be zero-shot transferred to various downstream tasks, including perception tasks and manipulation policy learning. Our benchmarking on an in-hand 3D pose estimation task shows that UniT outperforms existing visual and tactile representation learning methods. Additionally, UniT's effectiveness in policy learning is demonstrated across three real-world tasks involving diverse manipulated objects and complex robot-object-environment interactions. Through extensive experimentation, UniT is shown to be a simple-to-train, plug-and-play, yet widely effective method for tactile representation learning. For more details, please refer to our open-source repository https://github.com/ZhengtongXu/UniT and the project website https://zhengtongxu.github.io/unifiedtactile.github.io/.

Human dexterity is a hallmark of motor control. Our hands can rapidly synthesize new behaviors despite the complexity (multi-articular and multi-joints, with 23 joints controlled by more than 40 muscles) of musculoskeletal sensory-motor circuits. In this work, we take inspiration from how human dexterity builds on a diversity of prior experiences, instead of being acquired through a single task. Motivated by this observation, we set out to develop agents that can build upon their previous experience to quickly acquire new (previously unattainable) behaviors. Specifically, our approach leverages multi-task learning to implicitly capture task-agnostic behavioral priors (MyoDex) for human-like dexterity, using a physiologically realistic human hand model - MyoHand. We demonstrate MyoDex's effectiveness in few-shot generalization as well as positive transfer to a large repertoire of unseen dexterous manipulation tasks. Agents leveraging MyoDex can solve approximately 3x more tasks, and 4x faster in comparison to a distillation baseline. While prior work has synthesized single musculoskeletal control behaviors, MyoDex is the first generalizable manipulation prior that catalyzes the learning of dexterous physiological control across a large variety of contact-rich behaviors. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our paradigms beyond musculoskeletal control towards the acquisition of dexterity in 24 DoF Adroit Hand. Website: https://sites.google.com/view/myodex

Implantable wireless bioelectronic devices enable communication and/or power transfer through RF wireless connections with external nodes. These devices encounter notable design challenges due to the lossy nature of the host body, which significantly diminishes the radiation efficiency of the implanted antenna and tightens the wireless link budget. Prior research has yielded closed-form approximate expressions for estimating losses occurring within the lossy host body, known as the in-body path loss. To assess the total path loss between the implanted transmitter and external receiver, this paper focuses on the free-space path loss of the implanted antenna, from the body-air interface to the external node. This is not trivial, as in addition to the inherent radial spreading of spherical electromagnetic waves common to all antennas, implanted antennas confront additional losses arising from electromagnetic scattering at the interface between the host body and air. Employing analytical modeling, we propose closed-form approximate expressions for estimating this free-space path loss. The approximation is formulated as a function of the free-space distance, the curvature radius of the body-air interface, the depth of the implanted antenna, and the permittivity of the lossy medium. This proposed method undergoes thorough validation through numerical calculations, simulations, and measurements for different implanted antenna scenarios. This study contributes to a comprehensive understanding of the path loss in implanted antennas and provides a reliable analytical framework for their efficient design and performance evaluation.

Physical simulators have been widely used in robot planning and control. Among them, differentiable simulators are particularly favored, as they can be incorporated into gradient-based optimization algorithms that are efficient in solving inverse problems such as optimal control and motion planning. Simulating deformable objects is, however, more challenging compared to rigid body dynamics. The underlying physical laws of deformable objects are more complex, and the resulting systems have orders of magnitude more degrees of freedom and therefore they are significantly more computationally expensive to simulate. Computing gradients with respect to physical design or controller parameters is typically even more computationally challenging. In this paper, we propose a real-time, differentiable hybrid Lagrangian-Eulerian physical simulator for deformable objects, ChainQueen, based on the Moving Least Squares Material Point Method (MLS-MPM). MLS-MPM can simulate deformable objects including contact and can be seamlessly incorporated into inference, control and co-design systems. We demonstrate that our simulator achieves high precision in both forward simulation and backward gradient computation. We have successfully employed it in a diverse set of control tasks for soft robots, including problems with nearly 3,000 decision variables.

We present a Learning from Demonstration method for teaching robots to perform search strategies imitated from humans in scenarios where alignment tasks fail due to position uncertainty. The method utilizes human demonstrations to learn both a state invariant dynamics model and an exploration distribution that captures the search area covered by the demonstrator. We present two alternative algorithms for computing a search trajectory from the exploration distribution, one based on sampling and another based on deterministic ergodic control. We augment the search trajectory with forces learnt through the dynamics model to enable searching both in force and position domains. An impedance controller with superposed forces is used for reproducing the learnt strategy. We experimentally evaluate the method on a KUKA LWR4+ performing a 2D peg-in-hole and a 3D electricity socket task. Results show that the proposed method can, with only few human demonstrations, learn to complete the search task.

Visuo-tactile perception aims to understand an object's tactile properties, such as texture, softness, and rigidity. However, the field remains underexplored because collecting tactile data is costly and labor-intensive. We observe that visually distinct objects can exhibit similar surface textures or material properties. For example, a leather sofa and a leather jacket have different appearances but share similar tactile properties. This implies that tactile understanding can be guided by material cues in visual data, even without direct tactile supervision. In this paper, we introduce RA-Touch, a retrieval-augmented framework that improves visuo-tactile perception by leveraging visual data enriched with tactile semantics. We carefully recaption a large-scale visual dataset with tactile-focused descriptions, enabling the model to access tactile semantics typically absent from conventional visual datasets. A key challenge remains in effectively utilizing these tactile-aware external descriptions. RA-Touch addresses this by retrieving visual-textual representations aligned with tactile inputs and integrating them to focus on relevant textural and material properties. By outperforming prior methods on the TVL benchmark, our method demonstrates the potential of retrieval-based visual reuse for tactile understanding. Code is available at https://aim-skku.github.io/RA-Touch

Modeling the hand-object (HO) interaction not only requires estimation of the HO pose, but also pays attention to the contact due to their interaction. Significant progress has been made in estimating hand and object separately with deep learning methods, simultaneous HO pose estimation and contact modeling has not yet been fully explored. In this paper, we present an explicit contact representation namely Contact Potential Field (CPF), and a learning-fitting hybrid framework namely MIHO to Modeling the Interaction of Hand and Object. In CPF, we treat each contacting HO vertex pair as a spring-mass system. Hence the whole system forms a potential field with minimal elastic energy at the grasp position. Extensive experiments on the two commonly used benchmarks have demonstrated that our method can achieve state-of-the-art in several reconstruction metrics, and allow us to produce more physically plausible HO pose even when the ground-truth exhibits severe interpenetration or disjointedness. Our code is available at https://github.com/lixiny/CPF.

Bionic vision uses neuroprostheses to restore useful vision to people living with incurable blindness. However, a major outstanding challenge is predicting what people 'see' when they use their devices. The limited field of view of current devices necessitates head movements to scan the scene, which is difficult to simulate on a computer screen. In addition, many computational models of bionic vision lack biological realism. To address these challenges, we present VR-SPV, an open-source virtual reality toolbox for simulated prosthetic vision that uses a psychophysically validated computational model to allow sighted participants to 'see through the eyes' of a bionic eye user. To demonstrate its utility, we systematically evaluated how clinically reported visual distortions affect performance in a letter recognition and an immersive obstacle avoidance task. Our results highlight the importance of using an appropriate phosphene model when predicting visual outcomes for bionic vision.

Fine manipulation tasks, such as threading cable ties or slotting a battery, are notoriously difficult for robots because they require precision, careful coordination of contact forces, and closed-loop visual feedback. Performing these tasks typically requires high-end robots, accurate sensors, or careful calibration, which can be expensive and difficult to set up. Can learning enable low-cost and imprecise hardware to perform these fine manipulation tasks? We present a low-cost system that performs end-to-end imitation learning directly from real demonstrations, collected with a custom teleoperation interface. Imitation learning, however, presents its own challenges, particularly in high-precision domains: errors in the policy can compound over time, and human demonstrations can be non-stationary. To address these challenges, we develop a simple yet novel algorithm, Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT), which learns a generative model over action sequences. ACT allows the robot to learn 6 difficult tasks in the real world, such as opening a translucent condiment cup and slotting a battery with 80-90% success, with only 10 minutes worth of demonstrations. Project website: https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/

To achieve human-level dexterity, robots must infer spatial awareness from multimodal sensing to reason over contact interactions. During in-hand manipulation of novel objects, such spatial awareness involves estimating the object's pose and shape. The status quo for in-hand perception primarily employs vision, and restricts to tracking a priori known objects. Moreover, visual occlusion of objects in-hand is imminent during manipulation, preventing current systems to push beyond tasks without occlusion. We combine vision and touch sensing on a multi-fingered hand to estimate an object's pose and shape during in-hand manipulation. Our method, NeuralFeels, encodes object geometry by learning a neural field online and jointly tracks it by optimizing a pose graph problem. We study multimodal in-hand perception in simulation and the real-world, interacting with different objects via a proprioception-driven policy. Our experiments show final reconstruction F-scores of 81% and average pose drifts of 4.7,mm, further reduced to 2.3,mm with known CAD models. Additionally, we observe that under heavy visual occlusion we can achieve up to 94% improvements in tracking compared to vision-only methods. Our results demonstrate that touch, at the very least, refines and, at the very best, disambiguates visual estimates during in-hand manipulation. We release our evaluation dataset of 70 experiments, FeelSight, as a step towards benchmarking in this domain. Our neural representation driven by multimodal sensing can serve as a perception backbone towards advancing robot dexterity. Videos can be found on our project website https://suddhu.github.io/neural-feels/

Printed Electronics (PE) feature distinct and remarkable characteristics that make them a prominent technology for achieving true ubiquitous computing. This is particularly relevant in application domains that require conformal and ultra-low cost solutions, which have experienced limited penetration of computing until now. Unlike silicon-based technologies, PE offer unparalleled features such as non-recurring engineering costs, ultra-low manufacturing cost, and on-demand fabrication of conformal, flexible, non-toxic, and stretchable hardware. However, PE face certain limitations due to their large feature sizes, that impede the realization of complex circuits, such as machine learning classifiers. In this work, we address these limitations by leveraging the principles of Approximate Computing and Bespoke (fully-customized) design. We propose an automated framework for designing ultra-low power Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) classifiers which employs, for the first time, a holistic approach to approximate all functions of the MLP's neurons: multiplication, accumulation, and activation. Through comprehensive evaluation across various MLPs of varying size, our framework demonstrates the ability to enable battery-powered operation of even the most intricate MLP architecture examined, significantly surpassing the current state of the art.

The ability to associate touch with other modalities has huge implications for humans and computational systems. However, multimodal learning with touch remains challenging due to the expensive data collection process and non-standardized sensor outputs. We introduce UniTouch, a unified tactile model for vision-based touch sensors connected to multiple modalities, including vision, language, and sound. We achieve this by aligning our UniTouch embeddings to pretrained image embeddings already associated with a variety of other modalities. We further propose learnable sensor-specific tokens, allowing the model to learn from a set of heterogeneous tactile sensors, all at the same time. UniTouch is capable of conducting various touch sensing tasks in the zero-shot setting, from robot grasping prediction to touch image question answering. To the best of our knowledge, UniTouch is the first to demonstrate such capabilities. Project page: https://cfeng16.github.io/UniTouch/

Exploiting the promise of recent advances in imitation learning for mobile manipulation will require the collection of large numbers of human-guided demonstrations. This paper proposes an open-source design for an inexpensive, robust, and flexible mobile manipulator that can support arbitrary arms, enabling a wide range of real-world household mobile manipulation tasks. Crucially, our design uses powered casters to enable the mobile base to be fully holonomic, able to control all planar degrees of freedom independently and simultaneously. This feature makes the base more maneuverable and simplifies many mobile manipulation tasks, eliminating the kinematic constraints that create complex and time-consuming motions in nonholonomic bases. We equip our robot with an intuitive mobile phone teleoperation interface to enable easy data acquisition for imitation learning. In our experiments, we use this interface to collect data and show that the resulting learned policies can successfully perform a variety of common household mobile manipulation tasks.

Achieving human-level dexterity in robots is a key objective in the field of robotic manipulation. Recent advancements in 3D-based imitation learning have shown promising results, providing an effective pathway to achieve this goal. However, obtaining high-quality 3D representations presents two key problems: (1) the quality of point clouds captured by a single-view camera is significantly affected by factors such as camera resolution, positioning, and occlusions caused by the dexterous hand; (2) the global point clouds lack crucial contact information and spatial correspondences, which are necessary for fine-grained dexterous manipulation tasks. To eliminate these limitations, we propose CordViP, a novel framework that constructs and learns correspondences by leveraging the robust 6D pose estimation of objects and robot proprioception. Specifically, we first introduce the interaction-aware point clouds, which establish correspondences between the object and the hand. These point clouds are then used for our pre-training policy, where we also incorporate object-centric contact maps and hand-arm coordination information, effectively capturing both spatial and temporal dynamics. Our method demonstrates exceptional dexterous manipulation capabilities with an average success rate of 90\% in four real-world tasks, surpassing other baselines by a large margin. Experimental results also highlight the superior generalization and robustness of CordViP to different objects, viewpoints, and scenarios. Code and videos are available on https://aureleopku.github.io/CordViP.

Dynamic in-hand manipulation remains a challenging task for soft robotic systems that have demonstrated advantages in safe compliant interactions but struggle with high-speed dynamic tasks. In this work, we present SWIFT, a system for learning dynamic tasks using a soft and compliant robotic hand. Unlike previous works that rely on simulation, quasi-static actions and precise object models, the proposed system learns to spin a pen through trial-and-error using only real-world data without requiring explicit prior knowledge of the pen's physical attributes. With self-labeled trials sampled from the real world, the system discovers the set of pen grasping and spinning primitive parameters that enables a soft hand to spin a pen robustly and reliably. After 130 sampled actions per object, SWIFT achieves 100% success rate across three pens with different weights and weight distributions, demonstrating the system's generalizability and robustness to changes in object properties. The results highlight the potential for soft robotic end-effectors to perform dynamic tasks including rapid in-hand manipulation. We also demonstrate that SWIFT generalizes to spinning items with different shapes and weights such as a brush and a screwdriver which we spin with 10/10 and 5/10 success rates respectively. Videos, data, and code are available at https://soft-spin.github.io.

Tactile exploration plays a crucial role in understanding object structures for fundamental robotics tasks such as grasping and manipulation. However, efficiently exploring such objects using tactile sensors is challenging, primarily due to the large-scale unknown environments and limited sensing coverage of these sensors. To this end, we present AcTExplore, an active tactile exploration method driven by reinforcement learning for object reconstruction at scales that automatically explores the object surfaces in a limited number of steps. Through sufficient exploration, our algorithm incrementally collects tactile data and reconstructs 3D shapes of the objects as well, which can serve as a representation for higher-level downstream tasks. Our method achieves an average of 95.97% IoU coverage on unseen YCB objects while just being trained on primitive shapes. Project Webpage: https://prg.cs.umd.edu/AcTExplore

Industry standards require medical device manufacturers to perform implant-induced artefact testing in phantoms at a pre-clinical stage to define the extent of artefacts that can be expected during MRI. Once a device is commercially available, studies on volunteers, cadavers or patients are performed to investigate implant-induced artefacts and artefact reduction methods more in-depth. This study describes the design and evaluation of a realistic head phantom for pre-clinical implant-induced artefact testing in a relevant environment. A case study is performed where a state-of-the-art piezoelectric bone conduction implant is used in the 1.5 T and 3 T MRI environments. Images were acquired using clinical and novel metal artefact reducing (MARS) sequences at both field strengths. Artefact width and length were measured in a healthy volunteer and compared with artefact sizes obtained in the phantom. Artefact sizes are reported that are similar in shape between the phantom and a volunteer, yet with dimensions differing up to 20% between both. When the implant magnet is removed, the artefact size can be reduced below a diameter of 5 cm, whilst the presence of an implant magnet and splint creates higher artefacts up to 20 cm in diameter. Pulse sequences have been altered to reduce the scan time up to 7 minutes, while preserving the image quality. These results show that the anthropomorphic phantom can be used at a preclinical stage to provide clinically relevant images, illustrating the impact of the artefact on important brain structures.

One goal of dexterous robotic grasping is to allow robots to handle objects with the same level of flexibility and adaptability as humans. However, it remains a challenging task to generate an optimal grasping strategy for dexterous hands, especially when it comes to delicate manipulation and accurate adjustment the desired grasping poses for objects of varying shapes and sizes. In this paper, we propose a novel dexterous grasp generation scheme called GrainGrasp that provides fine-grained contact guidance for each fingertip. In particular, we employ a generative model to predict separate contact maps for each fingertip on the object point cloud, effectively capturing the specifics of finger-object interactions. In addition, we develop a new dexterous grasping optimization algorithm that solely relies on the point cloud as input, eliminating the necessity for complete mesh information of the object. By leveraging the contact maps of different fingertips, the proposed optimization algorithm can generate precise and determinable strategies for human-like object grasping. Experimental results confirm the efficiency of the proposed scheme.

Neural Network movement controllers promise a variety of advantages over conventional control methods however they are not widely adopted due to their inability to produce reliably precise movements. This research explores a bilateral neural network architecture as a control system for motor tasks. We aimed to achieve hemispheric specialisation similar to what is observed in humans across different tasks; the dominant system (usually the right hand, left hemisphere) excels at tasks involving coordination and efficiency of movement, and the non-dominant system performs better at tasks requiring positional stability. Specialisation was achieved by training the hemispheres with different loss functions tailored toward the expected behaviour of the respective hemispheres. We compared bilateral models with and without specialised hemispheres, with and without inter-hemispheric connectivity (representing the biological Corpus Callosum), and unilateral models with and without specialisation. The models were trained and tested on two tasks common in the human motor control literature: the random reach task, suited to the dominant system, a model with better coordination, and the hold position task, suited to the non-dominant system, a model with more stable movement. Each system out-performed the non-favoured system in its preferred task. For both tasks, a bilateral model outperforms the 'non-preferred' hand, and is as good or better than the 'preferred' hand. The Corpus Callosum tends to improve performance, but not always for the specialised models.

Research on autonomous surgery has largely focused on simple task automation in controlled environments. However, real-world surgical applications demand dexterous manipulation over extended durations and generalization to the inherent variability of human tissue. These challenges remain difficult to address using existing logic-based or conventional end-to-end learning approaches. To address this gap, we propose a hierarchical framework for performing dexterous, long-horizon surgical steps. Our approach utilizes a high-level policy for task planning and a low-level policy for generating robot trajectories. The high-level planner plans in language space, generating task-level or corrective instructions that guide the robot through the long-horizon steps and correct for the low-level policy's errors. We validate our framework through ex vivo experiments on cholecystectomy, a commonly-practiced minimally invasive procedure, and conduct ablation studies to evaluate key components of the system. Our method achieves a 100\% success rate across eight unseen ex vivo gallbladders, operating fully autonomously without human intervention. This work demonstrates step-level autonomy in a surgical procedure, marking a milestone toward clinical deployment of autonomous surgical systems.

In this work, we aim to teach robots to manipulate various thin-shell materials. Prior works studying thin-shell object manipulation mostly rely on heuristic policies or learn policies from real-world video demonstrations, and only focus on limited material types and tasks (e.g., cloth unfolding). However, these approaches face significant challenges when extended to a wider variety of thin-shell materials and a diverse range of tasks. While virtual simulations are shown to be effective in diverse robot skill learning and evaluation, prior thin-shell simulation environments only support a subset of thin-shell materials, which also limits their supported range of tasks. We introduce ThinShellLab - a fully differentiable simulation platform tailored for robotic interactions with diverse thin-shell materials possessing varying material properties, enabling flexible thin-shell manipulation skill learning and evaluation. Our experiments suggest that manipulating thin-shell objects presents several unique challenges: 1) thin-shell manipulation relies heavily on frictional forces due to the objects' co-dimensional nature, 2) the materials being manipulated are highly sensitive to minimal variations in interaction actions, and 3) the constant and frequent alteration in contact pairs makes trajectory optimization methods susceptible to local optima, and neither standard reinforcement learning algorithms nor trajectory optimization methods (either gradient-based or gradient-free) are able to solve the tasks alone. To overcome these challenges, we present an optimization scheme that couples sampling-based trajectory optimization and gradient-based optimization, boosting both learning efficiency and converged performance across various proposed tasks. In addition, the differentiable nature of our platform facilitates a smooth sim-to-real transition.

We introduce RotateIt, a system that enables fingertip-based object rotation along multiple axes by leveraging multimodal sensory inputs. Our system is trained in simulation, where it has access to ground-truth object shapes and physical properties. Then we distill it to operate on realistic yet noisy simulated visuotactile and proprioceptive sensory inputs. These multimodal inputs are fused via a visuotactile transformer, enabling online inference of object shapes and physical properties during deployment. We show significant performance improvements over prior methods and the importance of visual and tactile sensing.

Deformable Object Manipulation (DOM) is an important field of research as it contributes to practical tasks such as automatic cloth handling, cable routing, surgical operation, etc. Perception is considered one of the major challenges in DOM due to the complex dynamics and high degree of freedom of deformable objects. In this paper, we develop a novel image-processing algorithm based on Gabor filters to extract useful features from cloth, and based on this, devise a strategy for cloth flattening tasks. We also evaluate the overall framework experimentally and compare it with three human operators. The results show that our algorithm can determine the direction of wrinkles on the cloth accurately in simulation as well as in real robot experiments. Furthermore, our dewrinkling strategy compares favorably to baseline methods. The experiment video is available on https://sites.google.com/view/robotic-fabric-flattening/home

Dexterous manipulation has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. While machine learning techniques have shown some promise, results have largely been currently limited to simulation. This can be mostly attributed to the lack of suitable hardware. In this paper, we present LEAP Hand, a low-cost dexterous and anthropomorphic hand for machine learning research. In contrast to previous hands, LEAP Hand has a novel kinematic structure that allows maximal dexterity regardless of finger pose. LEAP Hand is low-cost and can be assembled in 4 hours at a cost of 2000 USD from readily available parts. It is capable of consistently exerting large torques over long durations of time. We show that LEAP Hand can be used to perform several manipulation tasks in the real world -- from visual teleoperation to learning from passive video data and sim2real. LEAP Hand significantly outperforms its closest competitor Allegro Hand in all our experiments while being 1/8th of the cost. We release detailed assembly instructions, the Sim2Real pipeline and a development platform with useful APIs on our website at https://leap-hand.github.io/

Humans excel in complex long-horizon soft body manipulation tasks via flexible tool use: bread baking requires a knife to slice the dough and a rolling pin to flatten it. Often regarded as a hallmark of human cognition, tool use in autonomous robots remains limited due to challenges in understanding tool-object interactions. Here we develop an intelligent robotic system, RoboCook, which perceives, models, and manipulates elasto-plastic objects with various tools. RoboCook uses point cloud scene representations, models tool-object interactions with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and combines tool classification with self-supervised policy learning to devise manipulation plans. We demonstrate that from just 20 minutes of real-world interaction data per tool, a general-purpose robot arm can learn complex long-horizon soft object manipulation tasks, such as making dumplings and alphabet letter cookies. Extensive evaluations show that RoboCook substantially outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, exhibits robustness against severe external disturbances, and demonstrates adaptability to different materials.

The Casimir effect and superconductivity are foundational quantum phenomena whose interaction remains an open question in physics. How Casimir forces behave across a superconducting transition remains unresolved, owing to the experimental difficulty of achieving alignment, cryogenic environments, and isolating small changes from competing effects. This question carries implications for electron physics, quantum gravity, and high-temperature superconductivity. Here we demonstrate an on-chip superconducting platform that overcomes these challenges, achieving one of the most parallel Casimir configurations to date. Our microchip-based cavities achieve unprecedented area-to-separation ratio between plates, exceeding previous Casimir experiments by orders of magnitude and generating the strongest Casimir forces yet between compliant surfaces. Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) is used for the first time to directly detect the resonant motion of a suspended membrane, with subatomic precision in both lateral positioning and displacement. Such precision measurements across a superconducting transition allow for the suppression of all van der Waals, electrostatic, and thermal effects. Preliminary measurements suggest superconductivity-dependent shifts in the Casimir force, motivating further investigation and comparison with theories. By uniting extreme parallelism, nanomechanics, and STM readout, our platform opens a new experimental frontier at the intersection of Casimir physics and superconductivity.

The growing adoption of batteries in the electric vehicle industry and various consumer products has created an urgent need for effective recycling solutions. These products often contain a mix of compliant and rigid components, making robotic disassembly a critical step toward achieving scalable recycling processes. Diffusion policy has emerged as a promising approach for learning low-level skills in robotics. To effectively apply diffusion policy to contact-rich tasks, incorporating force as feedback is essential. In this paper, we apply diffusion policy with vision and force in a compliant object prying task. However, when combining low-dimensional contact force with high-dimensional image, the force information may be diluted. To address this issue, we propose a method that effectively integrates force with image data for diffusion policy observations. We validate our approach on a battery prying task that demands high precision and multi-step execution. Our model achieves a 96\% success rate in diverse scenarios, marking a 57\% improvement over the vision-only baseline. Our method also demonstrates zero-shot transfer capability to handle unseen objects and battery types. Supplementary videos and implementation codes are available on our project website. https://rros-lab.github.io/diffusion-with-force.github.io/

Learning representations in the joint domain of vision and touch can improve manipulation dexterity, robustness, and sample-complexity by exploiting mutual information and complementary cues. Here, we present Visuo-Tactile Transformers (VTTs), a novel multimodal representation learning approach suited for model-based reinforcement learning and planning. Our approach extends the Visual Transformer dosovitskiy2021image to handle visuo-tactile feedback. Specifically, VTT uses tactile feedback together with self and cross-modal attention to build latent heatmap representations that focus attention on important task features in the visual domain. We demonstrate the efficacy of VTT for representation learning with a comparative evaluation against baselines on four simulated robot tasks and one real world block pushing task. We conduct an ablation study over the components of VTT to highlight the importance of cross-modality in representation learning.

Humans manipulate various kinds of fluids in their everyday life: creating latte art, scooping floating objects from water, rolling an ice cream cone, etc. Using robots to augment or replace human labors in these daily settings remain as a challenging task due to the multifaceted complexities of fluids. Previous research in robotic fluid manipulation mostly consider fluids governed by an ideal, Newtonian model in simple task settings (e.g., pouring). However, the vast majority of real-world fluid systems manifest their complexities in terms of the fluid's complex material behaviors and multi-component interactions, both of which were well beyond the scope of the current literature. To evaluate robot learning algorithms on understanding and interacting with such complex fluid systems, a comprehensive virtual platform with versatile simulation capabilities and well-established tasks is needed. In this work, we introduce FluidLab, a simulation environment with a diverse set of manipulation tasks involving complex fluid dynamics. These tasks address interactions between solid and fluid as well as among multiple fluids. At the heart of our platform is a fully differentiable physics simulator, FluidEngine, providing GPU-accelerated simulations and gradient calculations for various material types and their couplings. We identify several challenges for fluid manipulation learning by evaluating a set of reinforcement learning and trajectory optimization methods on our platform. To address these challenges, we propose several domain-specific optimization schemes coupled with differentiable physics, which are empirically shown to be effective in tackling optimization problems featured by fluid system's non-convex and non-smooth properties. Furthermore, we demonstrate reasonable sim-to-real transfer by deploying optimized trajectories in real-world settings.

The shift towards electrification and autonomous driving in the automotive industry results in more and more automotive wire harnesses being installed in modern automobiles, which stresses the great significance of guaranteeing the quality of automotive wire harness assembly. The mating of connectors is essential in the final assembly of automotive wire harnesses due to the importance of connectors on wire harness connection and signal transmission. However, the current manual operation of mating connectors leads to severe problems regarding assembly quality and ergonomics, where the robotized assembly has been considered, and different vision-based solutions have been proposed to facilitate a better perception of the robot control system on connectors. Nonetheless, there has been a lack of deep learning-based solutions for detecting automotive wire harness connectors in previous literature. This paper presents a deep learning-based connector detection for robotized automotive wire harness assembly. A dataset of twenty automotive wire harness connectors was created to train and evaluate a two-stage and a one-stage object detection model, respectively. The experiment results indicate the effectiveness of deep learning-based connector detection for automotive wire harness assembly but are limited by the design of the exteriors of connectors.