27.7HCMay 1
Prop-Chromeleon: Adaptive Haptic Props in Mixed Reality through Generative Artificial IntelligenceHaoyu Wang, Fengyuan Zhu, Bingjian Huang et al.
Mixed Reality (MR) aims to blend digital and physical worlds, but the absence of haptic feedback often breaks visual-tactile consistency. We introduce Prop-Chromeleon, a MR system based on generative artificial intelligence (AI) that dynamically transforms everyday objects into adaptive passive haptic props through user-provided text prompts. Our AI pipeline performs generation and anchoring of virtual assets that align with the shape of physical props, allowing us to study how virtual content generation behaves under geometric and prompt-based constraints. We evaluate Prop-Chromeleon's effectiveness through a generation study using varied object shapes and user prompts, combining quantitative shape similarity metrics with qualitative prompt fidelity analysis. Our user study further showcases Prop-Chromeleon's improvements in perceived realism, immersion, and enjoyment compared to static baselines. These results show that shape-aware generation can support both believable haptic interaction and creative engagement in MR.
60.3ROApr 26
Tube Diffusion Policy: Reactive Visual-Tactile Policy Learning for Contact-rich ManipulationTeng Xue, Alberto Rigo, Bingjian Huang et al.
Contact-rich manipulation is central to many everyday human activities, requiring continuous adaptation to contact uncertainty and external disturbances through multi-modal perception, particularly vision and tactile feedback. While imitation learning has shown strong potential for learning complex manipulation behaviors, most existing approaches rely on action chunking, which fundamentally limits their ability to react to unforeseen observations during execution. This limitation becomes especially critical in contact-rich scenarios, where physical uncertainty and high-frequency tactile feedback demand rapid, reactive control. To address this challenge, we propose Tube Diffusion Policy (TDP), a novel reactive visual-tactile policy learning framework that bridges diffusion-based imitation learning with tube-based feedback control. By leveraging the expressive power of generative models, TDP learns an observation-conditioned feedback flow around nominal action chunks, forming an action tube that enables fast and adaptive reactions during execution. We evaluate TDP on the widely used Push-T benchmark and three additional challenging visual-tactile dexterous manipulation tasks. Across all benchmarks, TDP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning baselines. Two real-world experiments further validate its robust reactivity under contact uncertainty and external disturbances. Moreover, the step-wise correction mechanism enabled by action tube significantly reduces the required denoising steps, making TDP well suited for real-time, high-frequency feedback control in contact-rich manipulation.