tactile pretraining for vision-language-action modelsExpert
Spark-0: Scaling Spatially Aligned Tactile Pretraining for Robot Dexterous Manipulation
Chinese start-up Xspark AI and university co-authors recorded 1,000 hours of people handling objects while wearing tactile gloves, and used that touch data to pretrain a robot manipulation model. In this preprint the touch-pretrained model raised success on an unseen humanoid benchmark from 52.5% to 71.7% even when the robot had no touch sensors at test time, and beat the strongest tactile baseline on real contact-rich tasks by 16 points.