Open Source
PolyUMI: Accessible Visual-Tactile-Audio Data Collection for Object Inference and Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO0 views
arXiv:2609.29760v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Humans typically rely on vision, touch, hearing, and proprioception to perceive contact and adapt their actions during manipulation. Providing robots with comparable responsiveness therefore requires hardware that can retain and use these complementary sensory signals. Most imitation-learning systems, however, observe demonstrations primarily through vision and proprioception, limiting access to contact information that is difficult to infer visually. We present PolyUMI, an open-source platform for scalable visual--tactile--audio demonstration collection and robot deployment. Its lightweight, wireless handheld gripper records synchronized wrist-camera, optical tactile, contact-audio, and proprioceptive observations without requiring a tethered workstation. The same sensing finger can be transferred to the robot end effector, preserving the sensing geometry between demonstration collection and policy execution. To effectively use these heterogeneous observations, we further introduce VisTA, a token-level multimodal policy that integrates information across sensors and time to predict contact-aware robot actions. Experiments spanning object inference, slip control, and contact-rich manipulation show that touch and audio reveal task-relevant information beyond vision and that VisTA is competitive with or outperforms existing multimodal policies. Together, PolyUMI and VisTA provide an accessible pipeline for collecting multimodal demonstrations and learning policies that perceive physical interaction beyond vision. Project Page: https://polyumi-vista.github.io
Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29760PreviousHarnessPAI: An Evolving Harness for Physical AINextRobot Learning with Visual Predicted Force
Related posts

Karpathy built HackerTube in 2 hours. I rebuilt it in the open and measured it
0dev.to AI
Show HN: Poinky – Claude Code you talk to, that sees your screen
0Hacker News Show
Show HN: DeskAccess – Open-source remote access for Raspberry Pi
0Hacker News Show
Show HN: The Public Eye – Agentic search for congressional bill legibility
0Hacker News Show
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover breaks historic record after traveling 28 miles
0Science Daily Tech
A fresh wave of cyberattacks has hit Europe’s supermarket refrigerators, destroying food across countries
0TechCrunch