2026-08-11 04:00 UTCOriginal source2 min readUpdated: 2026-08-11 08:40 UTC

Learning Physical Interaction: A Survey of Tactile- and Force-aware Robot Learning

arXiv:2608.07558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physically grounded robot intelligence requires robots to perceive, reason about, and regulate their interactions with the physical world. This capability is particularly critical in contact-sensitive manipulation, where successful task execution depends not only on visual perception and motion generation, but also on force regulation and adaptive control. In this context, recent robot learning methods have made substantial progress by integrating force, tactile, vision, language, and proprioceptive sensing into learned manipulation policies. In parallel, many systems adopt multi-phase architectures that combine high-level policies, action-refinement modules, and low-level controllers to bridge semantic task understanding with reactive physical execution. Despite these advances, existing surveys have not explicitly reviewed force- and tactile-aware robot learning from a unified perspective that jointly captures multimodal sensing and multi-phase system design. This survey addresses this gap by proposing TF-ART, a Tactile/Force-Aware Robot learning Taxonomy for multimodal and multi-phase frameworks, which maps individual methods into a unified hierarchical structure. The framework characterizes how recent works organize observation modalities, encode and fuse heterogeneous sensory inputs, generate and refine actions across multiple phases, and connect learned policies to reactive robot-end control. Building on this methodological view, we further examine the task settings and infrastructure requirements of physical interaction, thereby integrating both algorithmic and practical perspectives on force- and tactile-aware robot learning.

SourcearXiv RoboticsAuthor: Shilin Shan, Chuhao Zhou, Ruize Wang, Xinyan Chen, Xiangyu Chen, Xinyu Zhou, Boyu Ma, Iris Yuxuan Hu, Jingliang Li, Celeste Yuxuan Hu, Geng Li, Guohao Chen, Tianrui Zhu, Zhe Li, Yanjie Ze, Haoran Geng, Zhiyang Dou, Jianxin Bi, Yuejiang Liu, Jianshu Zhou, Jiachen Li, Paul Liang, Tatsuya Harada, Robert Katzschmann, Harold Soh, Na Li, Edward Johns, Danica Kragic, Jan Peters, Wojciech Matusik, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Jitendra Malik, Jianfei Yang

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[Submitted on 2 Aug 2026]

Title:Learning Physical Interaction: A Survey of Tactile- and Force-aware Robot Learning

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Abstract:Physically grounded robot intelligence requires robots to perceive, reason about, and regulate their interactions with the physical world. This capability is particularly critical in contact-sensitive manipulation, where successful task execution depends not only on visual perception and motion generation, but also on force regulation and adaptive control. In this context, recent robot learning methods have made substantial progress by integrating force, tactile, vision, language, and proprioceptive sensing into learned manipulation policies. In parallel, many systems adopt multi-phase architectures that combine high-level policies, action-refinement modules, and low-level controllers to bridge semantic task understanding with reactive physical execution. Despite these advances, existing surveys have not explicitly reviewed force- and tactile-aware robot learning from a unified perspective that jointly captures multimodal sensing and multi-phase system design. This survey addresses this gap by proposing TF-ART, a Tactile/Force-Aware Robot learning Taxonomy for multimodal and multi-phase frameworks, which maps individual methods into a unified hierarchical structure. The framework characterizes how recent works organize observation modalities, encode and fuse heterogeneous sensory inputs, generate and refine actions across multiple phases, and connect learned policies to reactive robot-end control. Building on this methodological view, we further examine the task settings and infrastructure requirements of physical interaction, thereby integrating both algorithmic and practical perspectives on force- and tactile-aware robot learning.

Comments: 53 pages, 7 figures

Subjects:

Robotics (cs.RO); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

Cite as: arXiv:2608.07558 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.07558v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.07558

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Shilin Shan [view email] [v1] Sun, 2 Aug 2026 14:22:01 UTC (2,408 KB)

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