(no entries)
Proposed date: 06/10/2025
Background: Assembly is a crucial skill for robots in both modern manufacturing and service robotics. Robot assembly is generally considered as a vison-tactile contact-rich manipulation task. While prior studies have improved task performance by naively combining force/torque data with vision information through the whole manipulation process, ignoring the fact that the importance of the vision and tactile signals are different in the multiple phases [1]. For instance, an assembly task involves three phases, i.e., “move to approach”, “move to contact” and “insertion”. Among these phases, vision perception only plays a key role in “move to approach”. While, the “move to contact” and “insertion” phrases relies on more the force feedback during the manipulation. In our previous works [2][3][4], we have developed a novel full-fledged for robotic systems to effectively solved the “move to contact” and “insertion” phases based on an approximated random approaching pose. To further complete the entire manipulation process, this works aims at solving the “move to approach” process by guiding the robot to an approximated aligned pose. By the active perception (proactive selection of camera views), the system gathers more data regarding the relative pose relationship between the male part and female part and utilized the information to guide the robot to align the male part to the female part [5][6].
Your Tasks: 1. Propose the autonomy allocation method in our application. 2. Estimate the relative pose and generate the corresponding robot motion command. 3. Make experiments to demonstrate the feasibility and superiority of this method.
Requirement: ⚫ Highly self-motivated; ⚫ Python programming experience; ⚫ Basic computer vision or machine learning background;
Supervisor: Yansong Wu, Dr. Xing Hao yansong.wu@tum.de hao.xing@tum.de
Proposed date: 06/10/2025
Key words: VLA; Foundation Model; Contact-rich Manipulation
Background: Recent progress in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models has opened up new opportunities in robotics, enabling generalization across tasks and environments []. While these models demonstrate impressive performance in vision-guided control, the role of tactile sensing—a crucial modality for contact-rich manipulation—remains underexplored. Only a limited number of studies have investigated how tactile information can be effectively integrated into such models [2-4], leaving a gap in leveraging this modality for improved robot robustness and dexterity. This thesis will investigate whether there exists a simpler yet effective way to enhance the performance of VLA foundation models on contact-rich manipulation tasks, by exploring fine-tuning a pre-trained strategy.
Your Tasks: 1. Reproduce the SOTA open-source model. 2. Fine-tune the model on the contact-rich manipulation tasks. 3. Contribute towards a publication-oriented study. (The concrete details of the research direction will be discussed in person for confidentiality reasons.)
Requirement: ⚫ High self-motivation and interest in publication work. ⚫ Background in deep learning. ⚫ Interest in robotics and robotic manipulation.
Supervisor: Yansong Wu, Junan Li yansong.wu@tum.de junnan.li(at)tum.de
Fine-Tuning a Robot Foundation Model for Contact-rich Manipulation
You can find more research opportunities at the Chairs of our Principal Investigators!
Data Protection Information
When you apply for a position with the Technical University of Munich (TUM), you are submitting personal information. With regard to personal information, please take note of the Datenschutzhinweise gemäß Art. 13 Datenschutz-Grundverordnung (DSGVO) zur Erhebung und Verarbeitung von personenbezogenen Daten im Rahmen Ihrer Bewerbung. (data protection information on collecting and processing personal data contained in your application in accordance with Art. 13 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)). By submitting your application, you confirm that you have acknowledged the above data protection information of TUM.