Manipulation

Contact-Rich Manipulation

Contact-rich manipulation is manipulation in which sustained, force-significant contact between the robot, object, and environment is essential to the task, as in insertion, assembly, wiping, prying, and in-hand reorientation. Such tasks feature hybrid dynamics, friction uncertainty, and partial observability of contact state, defeating pure position control. Successful systems combine compliance, force feedback, tactile sensing, or policies trained on real interaction data to exploit rather than avoid contact.

Why it matters for physical AI

Industrial assembly, logistics, and household work are dominated by contact-rich steps, making them the decisive test of whether learned policies deliver economic value beyond pick-and-place.