SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

Visible Touch: Rendering Contact for Visuomotor Policies

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 12, 2026 · UTC

Integrating contact information into visuomotor policies remains an open problem. Touch is essential to robust manipulation, yet most modern policies, including pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models, operate from vision and proprioception alone. Existing approaches to closing this gap require specialized tactile hardware, add separate tactile encoders, or commit to non-image policy backbones, all incompatible with the modern paradigm of image-conditioned policies built on pretrained 2D visual representations. Our key insight is that the bottleneck is not the contact information itself

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType

paper

region

Global