Semantics-to-Contact: A Stagewise Framework for Robust Contact-Rich Manipulation

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the Robot Papers editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Contact-rich manipulation requires precise control under complex contact dynamics while remaining robust to diverse visual conditions. However, real-world reinforcement learning often overfits to the visual appearance of training scenes. We propose Semantics-to-Contact (S2C), a stagewise framework for visually robust contact-rich manipulation. The insight is to decompose the problem into two stages: semantic focusing and contact refinement. In the first stage, a vision-language model localizes task-relevant regions across visually diverse scenes, providing coarse spatial guidance and reducing the burden of exploration. In the second stage, a real-world human-in-the-loop residual reinforcement learning policy learns fine-grained contact behaviors within the localized region using force feedback. To further improve visual robustness, we introduce an object-centric visual augmentation strategy that randomizes background appearance while preserving the robot and task-relevant objects. Experiments on six contact-rich real-world manipulation tasks exhibit that S2C consistently improves success rates over strong baselines and maintains reliable performance under significant visual and positional variations. These results demonstrate that stagewise semantic focusing and contact refinement provide a practical path toward visually robust real-world contact-rich manipulation. Our demos can be seen in https://edem-ai.github.io/S2C/.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

Comments