PTLD: Sim-to-real Privileged Tactile Latent Distillation for Dexterous Manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Chen, Rosy, Mukadam, Mustafa, Kaess, Michael, Wu, Tingfan, Hogan, Francois R, Malik, Jitendra, Sharma, Akash
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866908977488461824
author Chen, Rosy
Mukadam, Mustafa
Kaess, Michael
Wu, Tingfan
Hogan, Francois R
Malik, Jitendra
Sharma, Akash
author_facet Chen, Rosy
Mukadam, Mustafa
Kaess, Michael
Wu, Tingfan
Hogan, Francois R
Malik, Jitendra
Sharma, Akash
contents Tactile dexterous manipulation is essential to automating complex household tasks, yet learning effective control policies remains a challenge. While recent work has relied on imitation learning, obtaining high quality demonstrations for multi-fingered hands via robot teleoperation or kinesthetic teaching is prohibitive. Alternatively, with reinforcement we can learn skills in simulation, but fast and realistic simulation of tactile observations is challenging. To bridge this gap, we introduce PTLD: sim-to-real Privileged Tactile Latent Distillation, a novel approach to learning tactile manipulation skills without requiring tactile simulation. Instead of simulating tactile sensors or relying purely on proprioceptive policies to transfer zero-shot sim-to-real, our key idea is to leverage privileged sensors in the real world to collect real-world tactile policy data. This data is then used to distill a robust state estimator that operates on tactile input. We demonstrate from our experiments that PTLD can be used to improve proprioceptive manipulation policies trained in simulation significantly by incorporating tactile sensing. On the benchmark in-hand rotation task, PTLD achieves a 182% improvement over a proprioception only policy. We also show that PTLD enables learning the challenging task of tactile in-hand reorientation where we see a 57% improvement in the number of goals reached over using proprioception alone. Website: https://akashsharma02.github.io/ptld-website/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_04531
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PTLD: Sim-to-real Privileged Tactile Latent Distillation for Dexterous Manipulation
Chen, Rosy
Mukadam, Mustafa
Kaess, Michael
Wu, Tingfan
Hogan, Francois R
Malik, Jitendra
Sharma, Akash
Robotics
Tactile dexterous manipulation is essential to automating complex household tasks, yet learning effective control policies remains a challenge. While recent work has relied on imitation learning, obtaining high quality demonstrations for multi-fingered hands via robot teleoperation or kinesthetic teaching is prohibitive. Alternatively, with reinforcement we can learn skills in simulation, but fast and realistic simulation of tactile observations is challenging. To bridge this gap, we introduce PTLD: sim-to-real Privileged Tactile Latent Distillation, a novel approach to learning tactile manipulation skills without requiring tactile simulation. Instead of simulating tactile sensors or relying purely on proprioceptive policies to transfer zero-shot sim-to-real, our key idea is to leverage privileged sensors in the real world to collect real-world tactile policy data. This data is then used to distill a robust state estimator that operates on tactile input. We demonstrate from our experiments that PTLD can be used to improve proprioceptive manipulation policies trained in simulation significantly by incorporating tactile sensing. On the benchmark in-hand rotation task, PTLD achieves a 182% improvement over a proprioception only policy. We also show that PTLD enables learning the challenging task of tactile in-hand reorientation where we see a 57% improvement in the number of goals reached over using proprioception alone. Website: https://akashsharma02.github.io/ptld-website/.
title PTLD: Sim-to-real Privileged Tactile Latent Distillation for Dexterous Manipulation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04531