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Main Authors: He, Yuxin, Zhang, Ruihao, Shen, Tianao, Liu, Cheng, Nie, Qiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01939
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author He, Yuxin
Zhang, Ruihao
Shen, Tianao
Liu, Cheng
Nie, Qiang
author_facet He, Yuxin
Zhang, Ruihao
Shen, Tianao
Liu, Cheng
Nie, Qiang
contents Recently, active vision has reemerged as an important concept for manipulation, since visual occlusion occurs more frequently when main cameras are mounted on the robot heads. We reflect on the visual occlusion issue and identify its essence as the absence of information useful for task completion. Inspired by this, we come up with the more fundamental problem of Exploratory and Focused Manipulation (EFM). The proposed problem is about actively collecting information to complete challenging manipulation tasks that require exploration or focus. As an initial attempt to address this problem, we establish the EFM-10 benchmark that consists of 4 categories of tasks that align with our definition (10 tasks in total). We further come up with a Bimanual Active Perception (BAP) strategy, which leverages one arm to provide active vision and another arm to provide force sensing while manipulating. Based on this idea, we collect a dataset named BAPData for the tasks in EFM-10. With the dataset, we successfully verify the effectiveness of the BAP strategy in an imitation learning manner. We hope that the EFM-10 benchmark along with the BAP strategy can become a cornerstone that facilitates future research towards this direction. Project website: EFManipulation.github.io.
format Preprint
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Exploratory and Focused Manipulation with Bimanual Active Perception: A New Problem, Benchmark and Strategy
He, Yuxin
Zhang, Ruihao
Shen, Tianao
Liu, Cheng
Nie, Qiang
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Recently, active vision has reemerged as an important concept for manipulation, since visual occlusion occurs more frequently when main cameras are mounted on the robot heads. We reflect on the visual occlusion issue and identify its essence as the absence of information useful for task completion. Inspired by this, we come up with the more fundamental problem of Exploratory and Focused Manipulation (EFM). The proposed problem is about actively collecting information to complete challenging manipulation tasks that require exploration or focus. As an initial attempt to address this problem, we establish the EFM-10 benchmark that consists of 4 categories of tasks that align with our definition (10 tasks in total). We further come up with a Bimanual Active Perception (BAP) strategy, which leverages one arm to provide active vision and another arm to provide force sensing while manipulating. Based on this idea, we collect a dataset named BAPData for the tasks in EFM-10. With the dataset, we successfully verify the effectiveness of the BAP strategy in an imitation learning manner. We hope that the EFM-10 benchmark along with the BAP strategy can become a cornerstone that facilitates future research towards this direction. Project website: EFManipulation.github.io.
title Towards Exploratory and Focused Manipulation with Bimanual Active Perception: A New Problem, Benchmark and Strategy
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01939