Temporal Tactile Encoding and Compliance for Intent-Aware Robot-to-Human Bimanual Handover

Abstract

Reliable robot-to-human handover requires the robot to infer when the person is ready to receive the object, and release it safely, comfortably, and at the right time. This is challenging because visual observations alone may not disambiguate clear taking intent from accidental contact, weak grasping, wrong-direction forces, or transient interactions. In this work we treat human-robot handover as an intrinsically multimodal problem. Our approach couples a VLA model with a compliance controller that reduces interaction forces during object transfer. We finetune the VLA model with human demonstrations using RGB observation, temporally encoded tactile feedback and proprioception. We evaluate the complete system in a human-subject study against two baselines: one without tactile feedback and one using tactile feedback without compliance control. We hypothesize that combining compliance and temporal tactile encoding yields the most reliable and comfortable handovers, as compliance facilitates physical interaction while tactile history captures sustained taking intent. Performance is measured through objective metrics and an ad-hoc questionnaire. The results show that the two components provide complementary benefits and substantially outperform the baselines. Code and data will be released upon acceptance.