VTAP Gripper: Synergizing Fingertip Sensing and a Visuo-Tactile Active Palm for Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation

Abstract:This paper presents a tactile-reactive gripper that integrates a Visuo-Tactile Active Palm (VTAP) and compliant, reconfigurable fingers equipped with tactile array sensors. The design exploits structured finger-palm synergy and multi-modal perception to achieve both robust grasping and fine manipulation. The actuated bi-modal palm seamlessly combines long-range visual localization with contact-rich tactile feedback, substantially extending the system's manipulation capability. To bridge the embodiment gap between human hand motion and the heterogeneous three-finger structure, we further propose a staged, gesture-conditioned retargeting framework for dexterous teleoperation. Extensive experiments validate the system across a range of challenging tasks: reactive grasping of YCB and fragile objects, in-hand syringe reorientation and plunger actuation, singulation of clustered objects down to 3 mm in diameter, and vision-tactile peg-in-hole insertion. Results demonstrate that high manipulation performance can be achieved through coordinated finger-palm interaction and multi-modal sensing, without resorting to high degrees of freedom anthropomorphic designs. The VTAP gripper and its retargeting framework offer a practical reference architecture for dexterous gripper design, manipulation, and contact-rich data collection in support of learning-based approaches. Project webpage: this https URL.

8 pages, 10 figures, accepted to the 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026). Project webpage: this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2607.15448 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2607.15448v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.15448 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)