Robotics: Science and Systems XXII

Contact-Grounded Policy: Dexterous Visuotactile Policy with Generative Contact Grounding

Zhengtong Xu, Yeping Wang, Ben Abbatematteo, Jom Preechayasomboon, Sonny Chan, Nicholas Colonnese, Amirhossein H. Memar

Abstract:

Contact-rich dexterous manipulation with multi-finger hands remains an open challenge in robotics because task success depends on multi-point contacts that continuously evolve and are highly sensitive to object geometry, frictional transitions, and slip. Recently, tactile-informed manipulation policies have shown promise. However, most use tactile signals as additional observations rather than modeling contact state or how their action outputs interact with low-level controller dynamics. We present Contact-Grounded Policy (CGP), a visuotactile policy that grounds multi-point contacts by predicting coupled trajectories of actual robot state and tactile feedback, and using a learned contact-consistency mapping to convert these predictions into executable target robot states for a compliance controller. CGP consists of two components: (i) a conditional diffusion model that forecasts future robot state and tactile feedback in a compressed latent space, and (ii) a learned contact-consistency mapping that converts the predicted robot state-tactile pair into executable targets for a compliance controller, enabling it to realize the intended contacts. We evaluate CGP using a physical four-finger Allegro V5 hand with Digit360 fingertip tactile sensors, and a simulated five-finger Tesollo DG-5F hand with dense whole-hand tactile arrays. Across a range of dexterous tasks including in-hand manipulation, delicate grasping, and tool use, CGP outperforms visuomotor and visuotactile diffusion-policy baselines.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{XuZ-RSS-26, 
    AUTHOR    = {Zhengtong Xu AND Yeping Wang AND Ben Abbatematteo AND Jom Preechayasomboon AND Sonny Chan AND Nicholas Colonnese AND Amirhossein H. Memar}, 
    TITLE     = {{Contact-Grounded Policy: Dexterous Visuotactile Policy with Generative Contact Grounding}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2026}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Sydney, Australia}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2026.XXII.005} 
}