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Facet-0: A Robotic Foundation Model for Contact-Rich Precise Manipulation (arxiv.org)
2 points by baal80spam 24 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A robot model that guesses the push-and-pull forces each move will cause, then learns from real practice to pick moves that make contact go smoothly. On five tiny computer-assembly tasks it succeeded 82% of the time, versus 15% for the best usual approach.

Abstract

Real-world robotic assembly at sub-millimeter tolerances demands spatial precision, compliant interaction, and robustness to contact failures. We present Facet-0, a robotic foundation model that predicts and values the contact consequences of its actions. Facet-0 unifies multimodal representation learning and reinforcement learning (RL) post-training around a joint action-wrench proposal: a causal wrench history is aligned with vision-language semantics and kinematic state, and flow matching generates each action chunk together with the future wrist-wrench profile it is expected to induce. Deployment rollouts train a distributional Action-Wrench Critic to distinguish motions with similar task progress but different contact outcomes, while phase-aware rewards and contact-selective credit concentrate policy improvement on decisive interactions. To accommodate part-specific dynamics, a lightweight bounded actor reuses the frozen representation for on-robot adaptation; RL remains defined over executable Cartesian actions, while an auxiliary wrench head preserves predictive, non-commanded action-contact coupling. Trained on ManuFacet-1K, a 1,000-hour force-synchronized corpus spanning three embodiments and multiple manufacturing cells, the bounded task-adapted system reaches 82% mean success on five sub-millimeter computer-assembly tasks, compared with 15% for the strongest baseline, with 0.5 mm placement accuracy and 50 ms command latency.

Haoyuan Deng, Haichao Liu, Wenkai Guo, Yuan Ling, Zaijia Yang, Yuanjiang Xue, Haosheng Sun, Liangzi Wang, Ziwei Wang
arXiv:2609.01596 · cs.RO, cs.LG · submitted Sep 1, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Project page: https://pine-lab-ntu.github.io/facet-0/

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