# General In-Hand Object Rotation with Vision and Touch

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09979 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09979/

## Key facts

- Cited by 99 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10470/) (2021)
- [Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07113/) (2019)
- [Learning Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00177/) (2018)
- [Google Scanned Objects: A High-Quality Dataset of 3D Scanned Household Items](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11918/) (2022)
- [Learning Quadrupedal Locomotion over Challenging Terrain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11251/) (2020)
- [RMA: Rapid Motor Adaptation for Legged Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04034/) (2021)
- [VIMA: General Robot Manipulation with Multimodal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03094/) (2022)
- [Learning by Cheating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12294/) (2019)
- [Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14289/) (2023)
- [Masked Visual Pre-training for Motor Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06173/) (2022)
- [Real-World Robot Learning with Masked Visual Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03109/) (2022)
- [Deep Dynamics Models for Learning Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11652/) (2019)
- [DexMV: Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulation from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05877/) (2021)
- [DIGIT: A Novel Design for a Low-Cost Compact High-Resolution Tactile Sensor with Application to In-Hand Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14679/) (2020)
- [A System for General In-Hand Object Re-Orientation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03043/) (2021)
- [Legged Locomotion in Challenging Terrains using Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07638/) (2022)
- [DeXtreme: Transfer of Agile In-hand Manipulation from Simulation to Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13702/) (2022)
- [ContactDB: Analyzing and Predicting Grasp Contact via Thermal Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06830/) (2019)
- [VIOLA: Imitation Learning for Vision-Based Manipulation with Object Proposal Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11339/) (2022)
- [Learning High-Speed Flight in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05113/) (2021)
- [In-Hand Object Rotation via Rapid Motor Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04887/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 99)

- [Aligning Cyber Space with Physical World: A Comprehensive Survey on Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06886/) (2024)
- [3D Diffusion Policy: Generalizable Visuomotor Policy Learning via Simple 3D Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03954/) (2024)
- [Flow Matching Policy Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21053/) (2025)
- [Binding Touch to Everything: Learning Unified Multimodal Tactile Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18084/) (2024)
- [DexGraspVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Framework Towards General Dexterous Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20900/) (2025)
- [Learning Visuotactile Skills with Two Multifingered Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16823/) (2024)
- [A Touch, Vision, and Language Dataset for Multimodal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13232/) (2024)
- [TRANSIC: Sim-to-Real Policy Transfer by Learning from Online Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10315/) (2024)
- [Robot Synesthesia: In-Hand Manipulation with Visuotactile Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01853/) (2023)
- [Residual Off-Policy RL for Finetuning Behavior Cloning Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19301/) (2025)
- [Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Dexterous Manipulation on Humanoids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20396/) (2025)
- [TLA: Tactile-Language-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08548/) (2025)
- [Transferable Tactile Transformers for Representation Learning Across Diverse Sensors and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13640/) (2024)
- [Twisting Lids Off with Two Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02338/) (2024)
- [Beyond Sight: Finetuning Generalist Robot Policies with Heterogeneous Sensors via Language Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04693/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Fusion and Vision-Language Models: A Survey for Robot Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02477/) (2025)
- [Hand-Object Interaction Pretraining from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08273/) (2024)
- [See to Touch: Learning Tactile Dexterity through Visual Incentives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12300/) (2023)
- [ViViDex: Learning Vision-based Dexterous Manipulation from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15709/) (2024)
- [Body Transformer: Leveraging Robot Embodiment for Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06316/) (2024)
- [SPIDER: Scalable Physics-Informed Dexterous Retargeting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09484/) (2025)
- [World Models for Learning Dexterous Hand-Object Interactions from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13644/) (2025)
- [Neural feels with neural fields: Visuo-tactile perception for in-hand manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13469/) (2023)
- [CyberDemo: Augmenting Simulated Human Demonstration for Real-World Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14795/) (2024)
- [The Power of the Senses: Generalizable Manipulation from Vision and Touch through Masked Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00924/) (2023)
- [Tactile-Augmented Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04534/) (2024)
- [Lessons from Learning to Spin "Pens"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18902/) (2024)
- [AnySkin: Plug-and-play Skin Sensing for Robotic Touch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08276/) (2024)
- [AnyRotate: Gravity-Invariant In-Hand Object Rotation with Sim-to-Real Touch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07391/) (2024)
- [RoboPack: Learning Tactile-Informed Dynamics Models for Dense Packing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01418/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce RotateIt, a system that enables fingertip-based object rotation along multiple axes by leveraging multimodal sensory inputs. Our system is trained in simulation, where it has access to ground-truth object shapes and physical properties. Then we distill it to operate on realistic yet noisy simulated visuotactile and proprioceptive sensory inputs. These multimodal inputs are fused via a visuotactile transformer, enabling online inference of object shapes and physical properties during deployment. We show significant performance improvements over prior methods and the importance of visual and tactile sensing.