ETH/Berkeley tactile-curiosity robot paper TacEx accepted to CoRL 2026
arkrause · x · 2026-10-20
The paper "Tactile Curiosity Drives Robot Interaction" from ETH Zürich and UC Berkeley (authors include Andreas Krause and Pieter Abbeel) is accepted to CoRL 2026.
- Introduces TacEx: using tactile predictive uncertainty to guide exploration in robotic manipulation, separating visual, tactile and latent-state uncertainty in the exploration objective
- Evaluated in two settings: reward-free exploration (offline data collection for downstream pick-and-place policies) and diffusion steering (a lightweight policy selects noise inputs for a frozen VLA backbone)
- Addresses random exploration wasting interactions moving through free space instead of discovering contacts
Paper, code and videos are public; the team presents Nov 9-12 at CoRL in Austin.
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