HACo: Learning Haptic Active Compliance for Force-Aware Dexterous Manipulation

Abstract

Contact-rich dexterous manipulation requires policies that translate physical feedback into motion commands while regulating interaction loads across evolving multi-contact interactions. This requires haptic observations of contact state and action supervision showing how commands should adapt. Existing policies often overlook complementary fingertip tactile and joint-torque feedback, while common action targets either encode excessive loading or omit motion constrained by the object. We introduce HACo, a Haptic Active Compliance policy that learns force-regulating actions directly from haptic feedback. Compliance-regulated teleoperation converts operator inputs into controller-executable compliant actions that preserve motion intent while regulating loads. HACo learns these actions directly, using command-state discrepancy as auxiliary compliant-intent supervision. It combines local fingertip tactile responses with joint-torque feedback capturing load transmission through the articulated hand, including contacts beyond tactile coverage. A Compliance Grounding Module uses gated haptic cross-attention to ground action generation in the evolving haptic state, enabling closed-loop force regulation without explicit online contact modeling. We evaluate HACo on a real-world benchmark covering multi-contact friction, tangential interaction, fragile curved-surface contact, rotational torque, and deformable-object manipulation. Across 20 trials per task, HACo achieves an 83% mean success rate, compared with 35% for the strongest evaluated baseline. These results demonstrate active compliance across diverse force-sensitive dexterous manipulation tasks.