TouchWorld: Giving Robots a Sense of Touch

量子位 · wechat · 2026-07-12

This article introduces the tactile approach of Yang Shuo's team at Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) and their startup PHANESAI: from collecting visual-tactile data via EgoTouch, to recovering touch from first-person videos using TouchAnything, to integrating tactile feedback into world models and manipulation policies with TouchWorld.

What TouchWorld Does

Predicts not only visual changes but also how contact occurs and what the target contact state should be.
Introduces high-frequency tactile feedback during execution for real-time action correction, making it particularly effective for contact-intensive tasks like grasping, plugging, pressing, and wiping.

Experimental Results

Tested on 6 real-world robot tasks, including watering plants, clearing tables, plugging in power cords, inserting cups, wiping pots, and pulling tissues.
Achieved an average success rate of 65.0% in clean settings and 57.2% under human disturbance scenarios.
Outperformed baseline methods by 15.7 and 16.0 percentage points in the two settings, respectively.

Core Insights

Tactile sensing is not just "another sensor"; it is a critical infrastructure for embodied AI to enter the real world.
Vision and language alone are insufficient; robots need to know if they have made contact, grasped firmly, slipped, or applied appropriate force, and how to quickly correct themselves during contact.
The team is also advancing data collection, evaluation, and control loops for whole-body mobile dexterous manipulation in humanoid robots.

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TouchWorld: Giving Robots a Sense of Touch

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