arXiv subjects

Tongxuan Tian

Publications and source records attributed to Tongxuan Tian.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Learning Force-Regulated Manipulation with a Low-Cost Tactile-Force-Controlled Gripper

Successfully manipulating many everyday objects, such as potato chips, requires precise force regulation. Failure to modulate force can lead to task failure or irreversible damage to the objects. Humans can precisely achieve this by adapting force from tactile feedback, even within a short period of physical contact. We aim to give robots this capability. However, commercial grippers exhibit high cost or high minimum force, making them unsuitable for studying force-controlled policy learning with everyday force-sensitive objects. We introduce TF-Gripper, a low-cost (~$150) force-controlled parallel-jaw gripper that integrates tactile sensing as feedback. It has an effective force range of 0.45-45N and is compatible with different robot arms. Additionally, we designed a teleoperation device paired with TF-Gripper to record human-applied grasping forces. While standard low-frequency policies can be trained on this data, they struggle with the reactive, contact-dependent nature of force regulation. To overcome this, we propose RETAF (REactive Tactile Adaptation of Force), a framework that decouples grasping force control from arm pose prediction. RETAF regulates force at high frequency using wrist images and tactile feedback, while a base policy predicts end-effector pose and gripper open/close action. We evaluate TF-Gripper and RETAF across five real-world tasks requiring precise force regulation. Results show that compared to position control, direct force control significantly improves grasp stability and task performance. We further show that tactile feedback is essential for force regulation, and that RETAF consistently outperforms baselines and can be integrated with various base policies. We hope this work opens a path for scaling the learning of force-controlled policies in robotic manipulation. Project page: https://force-gripper.github.io .

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arXiv2025

O$^3$Afford: One-Shot 3D Object-to-Object Affordance Grounding for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

Grounding object affordance is fundamental to robotic manipulation as it establishes the critical link between perception and action among interacting objects. However, prior works predominantly focus on predicting single-object affordance, overlooking the fact that most real-world interactions involve relationships between pairs of objects. In this work, we address the challenge of object-to-object affordance grounding under limited data contraints. Inspired by recent advances in few-shot learning with 2D vision foundation models, we propose a novel one-shot 3D object-to-object affordance learning approach for robotic manipulation. Semantic features from vision foundation models combined with point cloud representation for geometric understanding enable our one-shot learning pipeline to generalize effectively to novel objects and categories. We further integrate our 3D affordance representation with large language models (LLMs) for robotics manipulation, significantly enhancing LLMs' capability to comprehend and reason about object interactions when generating task-specific constraint functions. Our experiments on 3D object-to-object affordance grounding and robotic manipulation demonstrate that our O$^3$Afford significantly outperforms existing baselines in terms of both accuracy and generalization capability.

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arXiv2025

Diffusion Dynamics Models with Generative State Estimation for Cloth Manipulation

Cloth manipulation is challenging due to its highly complex dynamics, near-infinite degrees of freedom, and frequent self-occlusions, which complicate both state estimation and dynamics modeling. Inspired by recent advances in generative models, we hypothesize that these expressive models can effectively capture intricate cloth configurations and deformation patterns from data. Therefore, we propose a diffusion-based generative approach for both perception and dynamics modeling. Specifically, we formulate state estimation as reconstructing full cloth states from partial observations and dynamics modeling as predicting future states given the current state and robot actions. Leveraging a transformer-based diffusion model, our method achieves accurate state reconstruction and reduces long-horizon dynamics prediction errors by an order of magnitude compared to prior approaches. We integrate our dynamics models with model predictive control and show that our framework enables effective cloth folding on real robotic systems, demonstrating the potential of generative models for deformable object manipulation under partial observability and complex dynamics.

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