Visuotactile manipulationExpert
Equivariant Visual-Tactile Diffusion Policy for Contact-Rich Manipulation
This preprint introduces VISTA, a diffusion-policy architecture that fuses wrist camera and tactile images into a rotation-equivariant spherical representation for contact-rich manipulation. In simulation with 50 demonstrations per task it reaches 80.9% mean success, outperforming an equivariant tactile baseline by 15.9 points, and on three real-robot tasks it succeeds in 7.33/10 trials versus 1.33/10 for that baseline. The design could reduce the demonstration data needed for tight-insertion and surface-contact tasks by encoding workspace rotation symmetry into visuotactile perception.