$TF^2$-Steering: Action Refinement with Tactile Forecasts and Feedback via Velocity-Field Steering
Yiming Chen, Xiaofei Wei, Chun Gu, Wei Xiao, Peidong Liu, Li Zhang
Tactile sensing plays a crucial role in everyday human interaction. Consider inserting a plug into a tight socket, vision alone provides limited guidance during the final insertion stage, and we instead rely on both anticipated contact and realized tactile feedback to ajust the insertion motion. The same capability is equally important for robots, particularly in dexterous manipulation tasks. Yet many contemporary robot policies remain vision-dominant. This visual bias, compounded by limited tactile data and sparse contact events, can cause directly incorporated tactile signals to be ignored or even compromise the policy's pretrained capabilities, yielding degrading performance as observed in our experiments. We present $TF^2$-Steering, which refines actions via learned residual steering of the flow-matching action expert's velocity field, using a tactile mixture-of-experts architecture to integrate both tactile forecasts and real-time tactile feedback. Together with specific designed three stages training recipe, $TF^2$-Steering enables tactile signals to correct and, when necessary, redirect the flow-matching action-generation process, while building on the strong action-generation capacity of the vision-based foundation policy. Extensive experiments across six simulated and six real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of $TF^2$-Steering. It outperforms the strongest evaluated baselines by 10.7 percentage points in average simulation success rate and 9.1 percentage points in average real-world progress success rate. Project page: https://yiming-cc.github.io/tf2-steering/.
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