# TouchBridge: Tactile-Conditioned Human-to-Robot Transfer for Dexterous Manipulation

“TouchBridge: Tactile-Conditioned Human-to-Robot Transfer for Dexterous Manipulation” (2026), by Haozhe Zhang et al. Engineering research paper. Original abstract below, unchanged. A free PDF is available.

- Authors: Haozhe Zhang, Gu Zhang, Zirui Zou, Yuzheng Chen, Jinlong Wu, Zixuan Hu, Jianke Zhang, Yucheng Hu, Zhecheng Yuan, Huazhe Xu
- Published: October 29, 2026
- Field: Engineering
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.40349
- Free PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.40349

## Abstract

Human demonstrations offer an efficient and scalable source of data for dexterous robot manipulation, but differences in sensing and hand morphology complicate the transfer of contact-rich interactions. We present TouchBridge, a hardware--software co-designed framework for human-to-robot data transformation. A wearable human demonstration interface and a corresponding robot interface establish cross-embodiment correspondence in visual and fingertip tactile sensing. We introduce Tac-Retarget, a tactile-conditioned retargeting method that uses measured contact to align fingertip contact patches and preserve their spatial relations within and across hands. Unlike object-aware or simulation-based transfer pipelines, Tac-Retarget requires no object mesh, object-pose estimate, or physics simulation for retargeting, enabling direct and scalable conversion of human demonstrations into robot-domain training data. Combined with visual synthesis and camera-anchored action conversion, TouchBridge produces robot-domain demonstrations for fine-tuning a pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) model. Across four real-world contact-rich tasks, policies fine-tuned solely on TouchBridge-converted human demonstrations achieve a 72.5% average success rate, compared with 77.5% using an equal number of teleoperated robot demonstrations, while human demonstration collection is 7.0x faster. Under the same policy and training setup, Tac-Retarget outperforms DexPilot and UniDex by 25.0 and 42.5 percentage points, respectively.

Canonical page: https://nerdi.pages.dev/paper/W7224927844
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