Exploring Pose-Guided Imitation Learning for Robotic Precise Insertion

Imitation learning is promising for robotic manipulation, but precise insertion in the real world remains difficult due to contact-rich dynamics, tight clearances, and limited demonstrations. Many existing visuomotor policies depend on high-dimensional RGB/point-cloud observations, which can be data-inefficient and generalize poorly under pose variations. In this paper, we study pose-guided imitation learning by using object poses in SE(3) as compact, object-centric observations for precise insertion tasks. First, we propose a diffusion policy for precise insertion that observes the relative SE(3) pose of the source object with respect to the target object and predicts a future relative pose trajectory as its action. Second, to improve robustness to pose estimation noise, we augment the pose-guided policy with RGBD cues. Specifically, we introduce a goal-conditioned RGBD encoder to capture the discrepancy between current and goal observations. We further propose a pose-guided residual gated fusion module, where pose features provide the primary control signal and RGBD features adaptively compensate when pose estimates are unreliable. We evaluate our methods on six real-robot precise insertion tasks and achieve high performance with only 7--10 demonstrations per task. In our setup, the proposed policies succeed on tasks with clearances down to 0.01~mm and demonstrate improved data efficiency and generalization over existing baselines. Code will be available at https://github.com/sunhan1997/PoseInsert.