Jonathan Francis

[Changyi Lin @changyi_lin1]

Contact does not always deform surfaces, especially when interacting with liquids and soft objects. However, most existing tactile sensors rely on surface deformation to infer contact.

Excited to share LightTact, a visual-tactile fingertip sensor that makes contact directly visible. It provides:

- Deformation-Independent Sensing: contact is detected optically, not inferred from surface deformation.
- High-Contrast Raw Images: non-contact pixels stay near-black.
- Pixel-Level Contact Segmentation: robust across materials, forces, appearances, and external lighting conditions.

This project was co-led with Boda (https://t.co/LknVoGsVYi). Grateful to all co-authors for their contributions, and many thanks to @yxyang1995 for the insightful discussions.

We will present LightTact at RSS 2026 in Sydney next week!
Paper: https://t.co/YX3bf9H4Vd
Open-source: https://t.co/67NTIXOuJO

[Uksang Yoo @UksangYoo]

How can we get robot hands to “hear” slip and contact through microphones, and react to them?

We’re excited to share VibeAct, an approach that uses piezoelectric microphones embedded in robot fingertips to estimate contact and slip, then learns reactive policies from this tactile feedback!

https://t.co/7jMLZNpYzp

[Saumya Saxena @saxena_saumya]

Can 3D scene graphs act as effective online memory for solving EQA tasks in⚡️real-time?

Presenting GraphEQA🤖, a framework for grounding Vision Language Models using multimodal memory for real-time embodied question answering.

[Uksang Yoo @UksangYoo]

Can robots make pottery🍵? Throwing a pot is a complex manipulation task of continuously deforming clay. We will present RoPotter, a robot system that uses structural priors to learn from demonstrations and make pottery @HumanoidsConf @CMU_Robotics
👇https://t.co/kOvQpkUyY3 1/8🧵

[Marius Memmel @memmelma]

Have some offline data lying around? Use it to robustify few-shot imitation learning! 🤖

STRAP 🎒 is a retrieval-based method that leverages semantic sub-trajectories in offline datasets to augment the training data.

🧵 1/6