Paper Detail

ForceBand: Learning Forceful Manipulation with sEMG

Botao He, Zhi Wang, Linna Kuang, Ishaan Ghosh, Jitendra Malik, Cornelia Fermuller, Tingfan Wu, Jiayuan Mao, Ruoshi Liu, Haozhi Qi, Yiannis Aloimonos

arxiv Score 6.2

Published 2026-06-24 · First seen 2026-06-25

General AI

Abstract

Human demonstrations are a scalable data source for learning robot manipulation policies. However, common sources of human demonstration data, such as motion-capture trajectories and internet videos, capture mostly motion and appearance while missing the contact forces that are critical for force-sensitive manipulation. In this paper, we introduce ForceBand, a low-cost wrist-worn sEMG system that turns human muscle activity into force-enriched demonstrations. We first collect a 10-hour multimodal dataset containing egocentric video, sEMG, IMU, and fingertip force measurements across diverse actions and objects. Using this dataset, we pre-train an EMG2Force model that predicts per-finger forces from sEMG and IMU signals. After a short user-specific calibration, users can collect target-task demonstrations using only ForceBand and video; EMG2Force then labels these demonstrations with per-finger force traces, producing force-augmented demonstrations for robot policy learning. Experiments show that ForceBand recovers fine-grained fingertip interactions with over 50% lower force prediction error than vision-based baselines and achieves an 87% success rate on pick, squeeze, and place tasks that require object-specific force control across objects with diverse shapes, sizes, and weights. Project website: https://forceband-emg.github.io

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BibTeX

@article{he2026forceband,
  title = {ForceBand: Learning Forceful Manipulation with sEMG},
  author = {Botao He and Zhi Wang and Linna Kuang and Ishaan Ghosh and Jitendra Malik and Cornelia Fermuller and Tingfan Wu and Jiayuan Mao and Ruoshi Liu and Haozhi Qi and Yiannis Aloimonos},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Human demonstrations are a scalable data source for learning robot manipulation policies. However, common sources of human demonstration data, such as motion-capture trajectories and internet videos, capture mostly motion and appearance while missing the contact forces that are critical for force-sensitive manipulation. In this paper, we introduce ForceBand, a low-cost wrist-worn sEMG system that turns human muscle activity into force-enriched demonstrations. We first collect a 10-hour multimoda},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26093},
  keywords = {cs.RO},
  eprint = {2606.26093},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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