ViTacGen: Robotic Pushing with Vision-to-Touch Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wu, Zhiyuan, Lin, Yijiong, Zhao, Yongqiang, Zhang, Xuyang, Chen, Zhuo, Lepora, Nathan, Luo, Shan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wu, Zhiyuan
Lin, Yijiong
Zhao, Yongqiang
Zhang, Xuyang
Chen, Zhuo
Lepora, Nathan
Luo, Shan
author_facet Wu, Zhiyuan
Lin, Yijiong
Zhao, Yongqiang
Zhang, Xuyang
Chen, Zhuo
Lepora, Nathan
Luo, Shan
contents Robotic pushing is a fundamental manipulation task that requires tactile feedback to capture subtle contact forces and dynamics between the end-effector and the object. However, real tactile sensors often face hardware limitations such as high costs and fragility, and deployment challenges involving calibration and variations between different sensors, while vision-only policies struggle with satisfactory performance. Inspired by humans' ability to infer tactile states from vision, we propose ViTacGen, a novel robot manipulation framework designed for visual robotic pushing with vision-to-touch generation in reinforcement learning to eliminate the reliance on high-resolution real tactile sensors, enabling effective zero-shot deployment on visual-only robotic systems. Specifically, ViTacGen consists of an encoder-decoder vision-to-touch generation network that generates contact depth images, a standardized tactile representation, directly from visual image sequence, followed by a reinforcement learning policy that fuses visual-tactile data with contrastive learning based on visual and generated tactile observations. We validate the effectiveness of our approach in both simulation and real world experiments, demonstrating its superior performance and achieving a success rate of up to 86\%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_14117
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ViTacGen: Robotic Pushing with Vision-to-Touch Generation
Wu, Zhiyuan
Lin, Yijiong
Zhao, Yongqiang
Zhang, Xuyang
Chen, Zhuo
Lepora, Nathan
Luo, Shan
Robotics
Robotic pushing is a fundamental manipulation task that requires tactile feedback to capture subtle contact forces and dynamics between the end-effector and the object. However, real tactile sensors often face hardware limitations such as high costs and fragility, and deployment challenges involving calibration and variations between different sensors, while vision-only policies struggle with satisfactory performance. Inspired by humans' ability to infer tactile states from vision, we propose ViTacGen, a novel robot manipulation framework designed for visual robotic pushing with vision-to-touch generation in reinforcement learning to eliminate the reliance on high-resolution real tactile sensors, enabling effective zero-shot deployment on visual-only robotic systems. Specifically, ViTacGen consists of an encoder-decoder vision-to-touch generation network that generates contact depth images, a standardized tactile representation, directly from visual image sequence, followed by a reinforcement learning policy that fuses visual-tactile data with contrastive learning based on visual and generated tactile observations. We validate the effectiveness of our approach in both simulation and real world experiments, demonstrating its superior performance and achieving a success rate of up to 86\%.
title ViTacGen: Robotic Pushing with Vision-to-Touch Generation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14117