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Chuqiao Lyu

Publications and source records attributed to Chuqiao Lyu.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

DexTouch-WM: Learning Action-Conditioned Tactile World Models from Human Touch for Dexterous Robot Manipulation

Learning predictive models of contact-rich dexterous manipulation requires dense tactile interaction, but such data are costly to scale on real robots and remain tied to embodiment-specific sensors. We introduce DexTouch-WM, an action-conditioned world model that learns from scalable human touch to jointly predict future RGB observations and bilateral tactile dynamics. Our insight is that human and robot manipulation share transferable contact dynamics when their tactile observations and action spaces are made compatible. We deploy flexible piezoresistive arrays with a shared sensing layout on both human and dexterous robot hands, and retarget human motion into the robot action space so that human interaction can supervise the same dynamics model used for real-robot prediction. DexTouch-WM couples a pretrained video expert with a lightweight tactile expert using anatomy-aware tactile tokens and aligned action conditioning. In human-to-robot scaling experiments, we keep five hours of real-robot supervision fixed while increasing human interaction from 0 to 100 hours, and observe substantial improvements in held-out robot-domain visual, geometric, and contact prediction despite disjoint human and robot task sets. Beyond prediction, we evaluate the world models as surrogate environments for policy evaluation and as generators of synthetic trajectories for real-robot policy learning, showing that scalable human interaction provides a complementary data axis for learning dexterous robot world models.

cs.RO

TouchSight: Bare-Handed Tactile Prediction from Egocentric Video via Generative Visual Augmentation

Tactile signals provide direct contact and force measurements that are essential for understanding physical interactions and enabling dexterous robotic manipulation. However, tactile sensing requires direct measurement at contact interfaces, making large-scale data collection reliant on intrusive, costly, and restrictive instrumentation. We present TouchSight, a monocular egocentric vision framework for dense full-hand contact force prediction that leverages 500 hours of pressure-glove recordings and extensive hand-object interaction (HOI) data. To address the appearance gap between gloved training data and bare-hand real-world scenarios, we construct TwinTouch-20H: 20 hours of paired visual data in which generative video models re-render gloved recordings as bare-hand observations against new backgrounds while preserving the original measured tactile labels. TouchSight predicts dense force from both gloved and generated bare-hand videos, outperforms prior contact prediction methods on OakInk2, qualitatively generalizes to natural bare-hand egocentric videos from unseen datasets, and improves consistently as glove supervision scales. These results demonstrate that dense tactile signals can be recovered from egocentric vision alone, without tactile instrumentation at capture time.

cs.CV

Towards Trustworthy Embodied Intelligence: A Systems Framework and Graded Trustworthiness Levels

Embodied intelligence integrates learned perception and decision making with real-time computation, control, and physical interaction. Because failures can cause immediate physical or operational harm, task completion alone does not establish trustworthiness. We define trustworthy embodied intelligence as the sustained capacity to execute specified tasks reliably under environmental and system variation while maintaining risk within acceptable bounds. We term this objective sustained safe success. Its supporting mechanisms are organized into four interdependent layers. The model layer generates task-competent action proposals with calibrated uncertainty and explicit safety preferences. The system layer realizes authorized actions dependably through integrated sensing, computation, control, hardware safeguards, fault containment, and fallback. The evidence layer substantiates bounded claims through evaluation, verification, validation, traceability, and structured assurance arguments. The deployment layer maintains claim validity through runtime monitoring, authority management, intervention, incident response, and controlled updates. Because assumptions and failures propagate across these layers, neither model capability, isolated safeguards, nor benchmark performance alone can establish end-to-end trustworthiness. Drawing on embodied AI, robotics, control, dependable computing, distributed systems, and autonomous driving, we further propose a non-normative hierarchy of trustworthiness levels. This hierarchy grades the strength of bounded deployment claims across task capability, safety, system assurance, operational governance, and supporting evidence, providing a basis for bounded deployment, comparative evaluation, research prioritization, and future standardization.

cs.RO

TouchAnything: A Dataset and Framework for Bimanual Tactile Estimation from Egocentric Video

Egocentric human video data, which captures rich human-environment interactions and can be collected at scale, has become a key driver of embodied intelligence research. However, existing egocentric datasets typically lack tactile sensing, a critical modality that provides direct cues about contact, force, and pressure in human-object interaction. Without such signals, models struggle to learn physically grounded representations of real-world interaction dynamics. While tactile sensors provide these cues, deploying high-quality tactile hardware at scale remains expensive and cumbersome. This raises a central question: can tactile feedback be inferred directly from visual observations, enabling scalable tactile supervision for egocentric video data and supporting physically grounded embodied learning? To enable research in this direction, we introduce EgoTouch, a large-scale multi-view egocentric dataset with dense tactile supervision for bimanual hand-object interaction. EgoTouch comprises 208 manipulation tasks spanning 1,891 episodes in diverse indoor and outdoor environments, with synchronized multi-view RGB (head-mounted egocentric and dual wrist-mounted cameras), bimanual 3D hand pose, and continuous pressure maps from wearable tactile sensors. Building on EgoTouch, we introduce TouchAnything, a baseline multi-view vision-to-touch prediction framework that uses the egocentric view as the primary input and flexibly leverages available wrist-mounted views at inference time. Experiments show that incorporating wrist-mounted views generally improves tactile prediction over egocentric-only input, achieving up to 5.0% relative improvement in Contact IoU and 6.1% relative improvement in Volumetric IoU. We will publicly release the dataset, code, and benchmark.

cs.RO

FlexiCup: Wireless Multimodal Suction Cup with Dual-Zone Vision-Tactile Sensing

Conventional suction cups lack sensing capabilities for contact-aware manipulation in unstructured environments. This paper presents FlexiCup, a multimodal suction cup with wireless electronics that integrate dual-zone vision-tactile sensing. The central zone dynamically switches between vision and tactile modalities via illumination control, while the peripheral zone provides continuous spatial awareness. The modular mechanical design supports both vacuum (sustained-contact adhesion) and Bernoulli (contactless lifting) actuation while maintaining the identical dual-zone sensing architecture, demonstrating sensing-actuation decoupling where sensing and actuation principles are orthogonally separable. We validate hardware versatility through dual control paradigms. Modular perception-driven grasping achieves comparable success rates across vacuum (90.0%) and Bernoulli (86.7%) modes using identical sensing and control pipelines, validating the sensing architecture's effectiveness across fundamentally different pneumatic principles. Diffusion-based end-to-end learning achieves 73.3% and 66.7% success on contact-aware manipulation tasks, with ablation studies confirming 13% improvements from multi-head attention coordinating dual-zone observations. Hardware designs, firmware, and experimental videos are available at the companion website: https://flexicup.junhaogong.top.

cs.RO

AVR: Active Vision-Driven Precise Robot Manipulation with Viewpoint and Focal Length Optimization

Robotic manipulation in complex scenes demands precise perception of task-relevant details, yet fixed or suboptimal viewpoints often impair fine-grained perception and induce occlusions, constraining imitation-learned policies. We present AVR (Active Vision-driven Robotics), a bimanual teleoperation and learning framework that unifies head-tracked viewpoint control (HMD-to-2-DoF gimbal) with motorized optical zoom to keep targets centered at an appropriate scale during data collection and deployment. In simulation, an AVR plugin augments RoboTwin demonstrations by emulating active vision (ROI-conditioned viewpoint change, aspect-ratio-preserving crops with explicit zoom ratios, and super-resolution), yielding 5-17% gains in task success across diverse manipulations. On our real-world platform, AVR improves success on most tasks, with over 25% gains compared to the static-view baseline, and extended studies further demonstrate robustness under occlusion, clutter, and lighting disturbances, as well as generalization to unseen environments and objects. These results pave the way for future robotic precision manipulation methods in the pursuit of human-level dexterity and precision.

cs.RO

MoiréTac: A Dual-Mode Visuotactile Sensor for Multidimensional Perception Using Moiré Pattern Amplification

Visuotactile sensors typically employ sparse marker arrays that limit spatial resolution and lack clear analytical force-to-image relationships. To solve this problem, we present \textbf{MoiréTac}, a dual-mode sensor that generates dense interference patterns via overlapping micro-gratings within a transparent architecture. When two gratings overlap with misalignment, they create moiré patterns that amplify microscopic deformations. The design preserves optical clarity for vision tasks while producing continuous moiré fields for tactile sensing, enabling simultaneous 6-axis force/torque measurement, contact localization, and visual perception. We combine physics-based features (brightness, phase gradient, orientation, and period) from moiré patterns with deep spatial features. These are mapped to 6-axis force/torque measurements, enabling interpretable regression through end-to-end learning. Experimental results demonstrate three capabilities: force/torque measurement with R^2 > 0.98 across tested axes; sensitivity tuning through geometric parameters (threefold gain adjustment); and vision functionality for object classification despite moiré overlay. Finally, we integrate the sensor into a robotic arm for cap removal with coordinated force and torque control, validating its potential for dexterous manipulation.

cs.RO

UltraTac: Integrated Ultrasound-Augmented Visuotactile Sensor for Enhanced Robotic Perception

Visuotactile sensors provide high-resolution tactile information but are incapable of perceiving the material features of objects. We present UltraTac, an integrated sensor that combines visuotactile imaging with ultrasound sensing through a coaxial optoacoustic architecture. The design shares structural components and achieves consistent sensing regions for both modalities. Additionally, we incorporate acoustic matching into the traditional visuotactile sensor structure, enabling integration of the ultrasound sensing modality without compromising visuotactile performance. Through tactile feedback, we dynamically adjust the operating state of the ultrasound module to achieve flexible functional coordination. Systematic experiments demonstrate three key capabilities: proximity sensing in the 3-8 cm range ($R^2=0.90$), material classification (average accuracy: 99.20%), and texture-material dual-mode object recognition achieving 92.11% accuracy on a 15-class task. Finally, we integrate the sensor into a robotic manipulation system to concurrently detect container surface patterns and internal content, which verifies its potential for advanced human-machine interaction and precise robotic manipulation.

cs.RO

MoDex: Planning High-Dimensional Dexterous Control via Learning Neural Internal Models

Controlling hands in high-dimensional action space has been a longstanding challenge, yet humans naturally perform dexterous tasks with ease. In this paper, we draw inspiration from the concept of internal model exhibited in human behavior and reconsider dexterous hands as learnable systems. Specifically, we introduce MoDex, a framework that includes a couple of neural networks (NNs) capturing the dynamical characteristics of hands and a bidirectional planning approach, which demonstrates both training and planning efficiency. To show the versatility of MoDex, we further integrate it with an external model to manipulate in-hand objects and a large language model (LLM) to generate various gestures in both simulation and real world. Extensive experiments on different dexterous hands address the data efficiency in learning a new task and the transferability between different tasks.

cs.RO

VET: A Visual-Electronic Tactile System for Immersive Human-Machine Interaction

In the pursuit of deeper immersion in human-machine interaction, achieving higher-dimensional tactile input and output on a single interface has become a key research focus. This study introduces the Visual-Electronic Tactile (VET) System, which builds upon vision-based tactile sensors (VBTS) and integrates electrical stimulation feedback to enable bidirectional tactile communication. We propose and implement a system framework that seamlessly integrates an electrical stimulation film with VBTS using a screen-printing preparation process, eliminating interference from traditional methods. While VBTS captures multi-dimensional input through visuotactile signals, electrical stimulation feedback directly stimulates neural pathways, preventing interference with visuotactile information. The potential of the VET system is demonstrated through experiments on finger electrical stimulation sensitivity zones, as well as applications in interactive gaming and robotic arm teleoperation. This system paves the way for new advancements in bidirectional tactile interaction and its broader applications.

cs.RO

Exo-ViHa: A Cross-Platform Exoskeleton System with Visual and Haptic Feedback for Efficient Dexterous Skill Learning

Imitation learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for robot skills learning. However, traditional data collection systems for dexterous manipulation face challenges, including a lack of balance between acquisition efficiency, consistency, and accuracy. To address these issues, we introduce Exo-ViHa, an innovative 3D-printed exoskeleton system that enables users to collect data from a first-person perspective while providing real-time haptic feedback. This system combines a 3D-printed modular structure with a slam camera, a motion capture glove, and a wrist-mounted camera. Various dexterous hands can be installed at the end, enabling it to simultaneously collect the posture of the end effector, hand movements, and visual data. By leveraging the first-person perspective and direct interaction, the exoskeleton enhances the task realism and haptic feedback, improving the consistency between demonstrations and actual robot deployments. In addition, it has cross-platform compatibility with various robotic arms and dexterous hands. Experiments show that the system can significantly improve the success rate and efficiency of data collection for dexterous manipulation tasks.

cs.RO