PneuTac: Tactile Manipulation with Soft Pneumatic Robots via Unified MPM-Gaussian Splatting Simulation

What happened

arXiv:2609.38418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soft robots and tactile sensors have demonstrated great potential in delicate manipulation tasks. Soft pneumatic robots enable safe contact through compliance, and vision-based tactile sensors offer high-resolution touch perception.

However, learning tactile manipulation with compliant robots has been challenging, bottlenecked by the lack of efficient simulation. Existing simulators typically model them in isolation, and exhibit large calibration gaps that are difficult to overcome efficiently. Real-to-sim modelling is done with a simple vision-based method, to then train action and perception networks for efficient simulation with surrogate models.