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TouchGuide: Inference-Time Steering of Visuomotor Policies via Touch Guidance

8 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

8 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Fine-grained and contact-rich manipulation remain challenging for robots, largely due to the underutilization of tactile feedback. To address this, we introduce TouchGuide, a novel cross-policy visuo-tactile fusion paradigm that fuses modalities within a low-dimensional action space. Specifically, TouchGuide operates in two stages to guide a pre-trained diffusion or flow-matching visuomotor policy at inference time. First, the policy produces a coarse, visually-plausible action using only visual inputs during early sampling. Second, a task-specific Contact Physical Model (CPM) provides tactile guidance to steer and refine the action, ensuring it aligns with realistic physical contact conditions. Trained through contrastive learning on limited expert demonstrations, the CPM provides a tactile-informed feasibility score to steer the sampling process toward refined actions that satisfy physical contact constraints. Furthermore, to facilitate TouchGuide training with high-quality and cost-effective data, we introduce TacUMI, a data collection system. TacUMI achieves a favorable trade-off between precision and affordability; by leveraging rigid fingertips, it obtains direct tactile feedback, thereby enabling the collection of reliable tactile data. Extensive experiments on five challenging contact-rich tasks, such as shoe lacing and chip handover, show that TouchGuide consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art visuo-tactile policies.

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cs.RO 7 cs.CV 1

years

2026 8

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UNVERDICTED 8

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representative citing papers

Referring-Aware Visuomotor Policy Learning for Closed-Loop Manipulation

cs.RO · 2026-04-07 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

ReV is a referring-aware visuomotor policy using coupled diffusion heads for real-time trajectory replanning in robotic manipulation, trained solely via targeted perturbations to expert demonstrations and achieving higher success rates in simulated and real tasks.

Tac-DINO: Learning Vision-Tactile Features with Patch Alignment

cs.CV · 2026-06-10 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Tac-DINO constructs a large tactile dataset and Vis-Tac Holographic Matching Benchmark, then proposes Vision-Tactile Patch Alignment (VTPA) methods that outperform non-aligned baselines on local-to-global feature matching.

Learning Tactile-Aware Quadrupedal Loco-Manipulation Policies

cs.RO · 2026-04-29 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0 · 2 refs

A hierarchical tactile-aware policy trained from human demos and sim RL improves real quadrupedal loco-manipulation by 28.54% on average over vision-only and visuotactile baselines.

TacCoRL: Integrating Tactile Feedback into VLA via Simulation

cs.RO · 2026-06-10 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

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

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