TACTILE-VLA：激活VLA模型的物理知识以实现触觉泛化（清华大学最新）

Core Insights - The article discusses the development of Tactile-VLA, a model that integrates visual, language, action, and tactile perception to enhance robotic capabilities in contact-intensive tasks [2][6][20]. Group 1: Background and Core Issues - Visual-language-action (VLA) models are crucial for general-purpose robotic agents, but they struggle in contact-intensive scenarios due to a lack of tactile perception [2]. - Tactile perception provides essential feedback for physical interactions, which is often missing in existing models [2]. Group 2: Key Innovations and Research Goals - The core finding is that VLA models contain prior knowledge of physical interactions, which can be activated through tactile sensors for zero-shot generalization in contact tasks [6]. - Tactile-VLA framework introduces tactile perception as a primary modality, allowing direct mapping from abstract semantics to physical force control [6]. - The mixed position-force controller innovatively converts force targets into position adjustment commands, addressing the challenge of coordinating position and force control [6][10]. - Tactile-VLA-CoT variant incorporates a chain of thought (CoT) reasoning mechanism, enabling robots to analyze failure causes and autonomously adjust strategies [6][14]. Group 3: Overall Architecture - Tactile-VLA's architecture features four key modules, emphasizing token-level fusion through a non-causal attention mechanism for true semantic representation rooted in physical reality [9]. Group 4: Mixed Position-Force Control Mechanism - The mixed control strategy prioritizes position control while introducing force feedback adjustments when necessary, ensuring precision in movement and force control [10][12]. - The design separates external net force from internal grasping force, allowing for refined force adjustments suitable for contact-intensive tasks [13]. Group 5: Chain of Thought Reasoning Mechanism - Tactile-VLA-CoT enhances adaptive capabilities by transforming the adjustment process into an interpretable reasoning process, improving robustness in complex tasks [14][15]. Group 6: Data Collection Methods - A specialized data collection system was developed to obtain high-quality tactile-language aligned data, addressing the issue of missing force feedback in traditional remote operations [16][19]. Group 7: Experimental Validation and Results Analysis - Three experimental groups were designed to validate Tactile-VLA's capabilities in instruction following, common sense application, and adaptive reasoning [20]. - In the instruction following experiment, Tactile-VLA demonstrated the ability to learn the semantic meaning of force-related language, achieving a success rate of 35% in USB tasks and 90% in charger tasks [23]. - The model effectively utilized common sense knowledge to adjust interaction forces based on object properties, achieving significant performance improvements over baseline models [24][30]. - In the adaptive reasoning experiment, Tactile-VLA-CoT achieved an 80% success rate in a blackboard task, showcasing its ability to diagnose and correct failures autonomously [28][32].