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arXiv · 2609.15921

Touch2Trace: Tactile-Driven Imitation Learning for Dexterous Cable Tracing

Matteo Grimaldi·David Klee·Ziling Chen·Tong Jian·Wonju Lee·Wenjie Lu·Tao Yu·Saleh Nabi
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Abstract

Dexterous manipulation of deformable objects demands continuous fingertip-level regulation of pressure, friction, and incipient slip. We study one of the most challenging cases: dexterous cable tracing, feeding a cable through the hand with repeated pinch-and-curl motions of the thumb and index finger. We introduce Touch2Trace, a tactile-driven imitation-learning system for this task, and provide, to our knowledge, the first systematic real-world characterization of how encoder pretraining, control rate, temporal context, and spatial resolution each shape policy performance. The winning learning recipe combines a tactile encoder pretrained for a custom 32 x 32 piezoresistive sensor (TacV5) via self-supervised learning with a lightweight transformer policy trained on teleoperated demonstrations via behavior cloning, deployed at 60 Hz on a Tesollo DG-5F hand. Tactile feedback without vision or explicit cable-state estimation significantly improves tracing performance versus a proprioception-only baseline: from 0.2 cm to 20.1 cm mean distance and 0% to 93% success rate, with zero-shot transfer to unseen cables and routing conditions. The results quantify the influence of key parameters in tactile-driven systems for reliable dexterous deformable object manipulation.

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Matteo Grimaldi, David Klee, Ziling Chen, Tong Jian, Wonju Lee, Wenjie Lu, Tao Yu, Saleh Nabi. 2026-09-14. Touch2Trace: Tactile-Driven Imitation Learning for Dexterous Cable Tracing. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15921

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