Dreaming the Sound of Contact: Leveraging Video and Audio Generation for Zero-Shot Force-Aware Manipulation and Data Generation

Abstract:Recent advances in video generation allow robots to learn manipulation trajectories from generated videos. However, these approaches produce purely kinematic trajectories that lack force information, causing failures in contact-rich tasks where appropriate contact forces are essential for success. In this work, we explore augmenting generated video with audio to shape a bounded, time-varying desired-force profile using the loudness of generated contact sounds. We present a pipeline that jointly leverages generated video and audio to derive motion trajectories and corresponding desired-force profiles from a structured natural-language task prompt. We execute these force-aware trajectories on a Franka Panda robot using a closed-loop force regulator that tracks the audio-shaped force profile during contact. We evaluate our pipeline on multiple tasks that require making contact and demonstrate successful manipulation where a kinematic-only baseline fails. We also use the pipeline as a data generation engine to train policies that achieve the tasks in a closed-loop manner. Project website, videos, and dataset: this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.19137 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.19137v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.19137 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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