Paper Detail

Dreaming the Sound of Contact: Leveraging Video and Audio Generation for Zero-Shot Force-Aware Manipulation and Data Generation

Guanhua Ji, Tianyu Li, Dayoon Suh, Yuqian Zhang, Boyan Zhang, Nadia Figueroa

arxiv Score 5.8

Published 2026-09-16 · First seen 2026-09-17

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Abstract

Recent advances in video generation allow robots to learn manipulation trajectories from generated videos. However, these approaches produce purely kinematic trajectories that lack force information, causing failures in contact-rich tasks where appropriate contact forces are essential for success. In this work, we explore augmenting generated video with audio to shape a bounded, time-varying desired-force profile using the loudness of generated contact sounds. We present a pipeline that jointly leverages generated video and audio to derive motion trajectories and corresponding desired-force profiles from a structured natural-language task prompt. We execute these force-aware trajectories on a Franka Panda robot using a closed-loop force regulator that tracks the audio-shaped force profile during contact. We evaluate our pipeline on multiple tasks that require making contact and demonstrate successful manipulation where a kinematic-only baseline fails. We also use the pipeline as a data generation engine to train policies that achieve the tasks in a closed-loop manner. Project website, videos, and dataset: https://dreamingcontactsound.github.io/

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BibTeX

@article{ji2026dreaming,
  title = {Dreaming the Sound of Contact: Leveraging Video and Audio Generation for Zero-Shot Force-Aware Manipulation and Data Generation},
  author = {Guanhua Ji and Tianyu Li and Dayoon Suh and Yuqian Zhang and Boyan Zhang and Nadia Figueroa},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Recent advances in video generation allow robots to learn manipulation trajectories from generated videos. However, these approaches produce purely kinematic trajectories that lack force information, causing failures in contact-rich tasks where appropriate contact forces are essential for success. In this work, we explore augmenting generated video with audio to shape a bounded, time-varying desired-force profile using the loudness of generated contact sounds. We present a pipeline that jointly },
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19137},
  keywords = {cs.RO, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2609.19137},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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