Imagining the Sense of Touch: Touch-Informed Manipulation via Imagined Tactile Representations

arXiv:2607.01684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile sensing can substantially improve contact-rich robotic manipulation, yet its practical deployment remains limited by the fragility, calibration requirements, and maintenance burden of tactile hardware. This raises a fundamental question: can robots benefit from tactile knowledge without requiring tactile sensors at deployment? We present TacImag, a tactile imagination framework that predicts tactile observations from vision and propriocepti...