Force Policy: Learning Hybrid Force-Position Control Policy under Interaction Frame for Contact-Rich Manipulation
For robotic manipulation tasks requiring contact-rich interaction, this work addresses the bottleneck of integrating vision and force feedback in a principled manner, offering a practical method that improves both stability and generalization over existing baselines.
Force Policy introduces a global-local vision-force policy that decouples force regulation from motion execution via a learned interaction frame, achieving more robust contact establishment and accurate force regulation across diverse contact-rich tasks, with reliable generalization to novel objects.
Contact-rich manipulation demands human-like integration of perception and force feedback: vision should guide task progress, while high-frequency interaction control must stabilize contact under uncertainty. Existing learning-based policies often entangle these roles in a monolithic network, trading off global generalization against stable local refinement, while control-centric approaches typically assume a known task structure or learn only controller parameters rather than the structure itself. In this paper, we formalize a physically grounded interaction frame, an instantaneous local basis that decouples force regulation from motion execution, and propose a method to recover it from demonstrations. Based on this, we address both issues by proposing Force Policy, a global-local vision-force policy in which a global policy guides free-space actions using vision, and upon contact, a high-frequency local policy with force feedback estimates the interaction frame and executes hybrid force-position control for stable interaction. Real-world experiments across diverse contact-rich tasks show consistent gains over strong baselines, with more robust contact establishment, more accurate force regulation, and reliable generalization to novel objects with varied geometries and physical properties, ultimately improving both contact stability and execution quality. Project page: https://force-policy.github.io/