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A Survey on Imitation Learning for Contact-Rich Tasks in Robotics

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arxiv 2506.13498 v1 pith:7PFD32EW submitted 2025-06-16 cs.RO cs.HCcs.LGcs.SYeess.SY

A Survey on Imitation Learning for Contact-Rich Tasks in Robotics

classification cs.RO cs.HCcs.LGcs.SYeess.SY
keywords contact-richlearningtasksimitationcomplexdynamicsfoundationmanipulation
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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This paper comprehensively surveys research trends in imitation learning for contact-rich robotic tasks. Contact-rich tasks, which require complex physical interactions with the environment, represent a central challenge in robotics due to their nonlinear dynamics and sensitivity to small positional deviations. The paper examines demonstration collection methodologies, including teaching methods and sensory modalities crucial for capturing subtle interaction dynamics. We then analyze imitation learning approaches, highlighting their applications to contact-rich manipulation. Recent advances in multimodal learning and foundation models have significantly enhanced performance in complex contact tasks across industrial, household, and healthcare domains. Through systematic organization of current research and identification of challenges, this survey provides a foundation for future advancements in contact-rich robotic manipulation.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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

  1. CaLiSym: Learning Symplectic Dynamics of Real-World Systems through Structured Canonical Lifts

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    Exact symplectic learning extends to open robotic systems via an algebraic structured canonical lift, improving OOD autoregressive prediction on pendulum, quadrotor, and quadruped with parameter-efficient SympNets.

  2. Spacetime Optimal-Transport Attention for Visuo-Haptic Imitation Learning of Contact-Rich Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    SO-TA replaces standard attention with optimal-transport alignment across vision, force/torque, and proprioception to improve diffusion-policy performance on real-robot insertion and wiping tasks.

  3. Input-gated Bilateral Teleoperation: An Easy-to-implement Force Feedback Teleoperation Method for Low-cost Hardware

    cs.RO 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0

    A simple bilateral teleoperation law that clamps the leader's control input to the follower's input achieves both easy free motion and stable contact on low-cost hardware.

  4. CaLiSym: Learning Symplectic Dynamics of Real-World Systems through Structured Canonical Lifts

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    Lifting non-conservative, actuated, and contact-constrained robot dynamics into an exactly symplectic phase-space map yields state-of-the-art out-of-distribution autoregressive rollout error at low parameter and FLOP cost.

  5. PRIME: Physically-consistent Robotic Inertial and Motion Estimation for Legged and Humanoid Robots

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    PRIME is a MAP optimization framework that refines onboard kinematics into dynamically consistent trajectories for legged robots while jointly estimating contact forces and inertial parameters using differentiable smo...

  6. CONTACT: CONtact-aware TACTile Learning for Robotic Disassembly

    cs.RO 2026-03 conditional novelty 5.0

    In contact-rich robotic disassembly, compact force-field tactile representations (TacFF) outperform vision-only and high-resolution tactile-image policies, especially in tight-tolerance and deformable tasks; naive fus...