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research article

Robust contact-rich manipulation through implicit motor adaptation

Xue, Teng  
•
Razmjoo, Amirreza
•
Shetty, Suhan  
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June 12, 2025
The International Journal of Robotics Research

Contact-rich manipulation plays an important role in daily human activities. However, uncertain physical parameters often pose significant challenges for both planning and control. A promising strategy is to develop policies that are robust across a wide range of parameters. Domain adaptation and domain randomization are widely used, but they tend to either limit generalization to new instances or perform conservatively due to neglecting instance-specific information. Explicit motor adaptation addresses these issues by estimating system parameters online and then retrieving the parameter-conditioned policy from a parameter-augmented base policy. However, it typically requires precise system identification or additional training of a student policy, both of which are challenging in contact-rich manipulation tasks with diverse physical parameters. In this work, we propose implicit motor adaptation , which enables parameter-conditioned policy retrieval given a roughly estimated parameter distribution instead of a single estimate. We leverage tensor train as an implicit representation of the base policy, facilitating efficient retrieval of the parameter-conditioned policy by exploiting the separable structure of tensor cores. This framework eliminates the need for precise system estimation and policy retraining while preserving optimal behavior and strong generalization. We provide a theoretical analysis to validate the approach, supported by numerical evaluations on three contact-rich manipulation primitives. Both simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate its ability to generate robust policies across diverse instances. Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/implicit-ma .

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1177/02783649251344638
Author(s)
Xue, Teng  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Razmjoo, Amirreza

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Shetty, Suhan  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Calinon, Sylvain  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Date Issued

2025-06-12

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Published in
The International Journal of Robotics Research
Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LIDIAP  
FunderFunding(s)Grant NumberGrant URL

China Scholarship Council

202106230104

HORIZON EUROPE Digital, Industry and Space

101070136

HORIZON EUROPE Digital, Industry and Space

101070310

Available on Infoscience
June 16, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/251369
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