Spatially anchored Tactile Awareness for Robust Dexterous Manipulation

Abstract

Dexterous manipulation requires precise geometric reasoning, yet existing visuo-tactile learning methods struggle with sub-millimeter precision tasks that are routine for traditional model-based approaches. We identify a key limitation: while tactile sensors provide rich contact information, current learning frameworks fail to effectively leverage both the perceptual richness of tactile signals and their spatial relationship with hand kinematics. We believe an ideal tactile representation should explicitly ground contact measurements in a stable reference frame while preserving detailed sensory information, enabling policies to not only detect contact occurrence but also precisely infer object geometry in the hand's coordinate system. We introduce SaTA (Spatially-anchored Tactile Awareness for dexterous manipulation), an end-to-end policy framework that explicitly anchors tactile features to the hand's kinematic frame through forward kinematics, enabling accurate geometric reasoning without requiring object models or explicit pose estimation. Our key insight is that spatially grounded tactile representations allow policies to not only detect contact occurrence but also precisely infer object geometry in the hand's coordinate system. We validate SaTA on challenging dexterous manipulation tasks, including bimanual USB-C mating in free space, a task demanding sub-millimeter alignment precision, as well as light bulb installation requiring precise thread engagement and rotational control, and card sliding that demands delicate force modulation and angular precision. These tasks represent significant challenges for learning-based methods due to their stringent precision requirements. Across multiple benchmarks, SaTA significantly outperforms strong visuo-tactile baselines, improving success rates by up to 30 percentage while reducing task completion times by 27 percentage.