Touch2Robot: Robot Touch in the Human Demonstration Loop
arXiv:2609.24660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human demonstrations offer a scalable way to collect manipulation data, but their contacts may be unstable or infeasible when transferred to a robot hand. Collecting demonstrations directly on the target robot avoids this mismatch, but substantially increases the cost of data collection. To address this trade-off, we present \textbf{Touch2Robot}, a framework that lets humans collect demonstrations while seeing how the target robot hand would contact the object. We capture human hand motion, tactile-glove measurements, and object motion during human manipulation. These recordings guide object-specific RL policies to reproduce the demonstrated object motion while favoring contacts consistent with the recorded human touch. We distill the learned behaviors into a unified real-time retargeter that maps incoming human observations and object geometry to robot hand configurations. During collection, the predicted robot configuration is synchroni

