# FreeTacMan: Robot-free Visuo-Tactile Data Collection System for Contact-rich Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01941 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01941/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00080/) (2026)
- [Is Diversity All You Need for Scalable Robotic Manipulation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06219/) (2025)
- [TaF-VLA: Tactile-Force Alignment in Vision-Language-Action Models for Force-aware Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20321/) (2026)
- [AnyTouch 2: General Optical Tactile Representation Learning For Dynamic Tactile Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09617/) (2026)
- [OCRA: Object-Centric Learning with 3D and Tactile Priors for Human-to-Robot Action Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14401/) (2026)
- [Data Pyramid for Embodied Manipulation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24744/) (2026)
- [ChronoDreamer: Action-Conditioned World Model as an Online Simulator for Robotic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18619/) (2025)
- [DECO: Decoupled Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation with a Plugin Tactile Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05513/) (2026)
- [YUBI: Yielding Universal Bidigital Interface for Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10244/) (2026)
- [ContactWorld: What Representations Matter for Vision-Tactile Latent World Models in Contact-Rich Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13877/) (2026)
- [VTouch++: A Multimodal Dataset with Vision-Based Tactile Enhancement for Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20444/) (2026)
- [Tactile-based Multimodal Fusion in Embodied Intelligence: A Survey of Vision, Language, and Contact-Driven Paradigms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17336/) (2026)
- [Seeing Touch from Motion: A Unified Modality-Aware Visuo-Tactile Policy with Tactile Motion Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29941/) (2026)
- [KineVLA: Towards Kinematics-Aware Vision-Language-Action Models with Bi-Level Action Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17524/) (2026)
- [RCT: A Robot-Collected Touch-Vision-Language Dataset for Tactile Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31694/) (2026)
- [Pre-training Visual Dexterity in Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15917/) (2026)
- [VT-MUSE: Multimodal Unified Sequential Visuotactile Representation Learning for Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21290/) (2026)
- [The Potential of Haptic Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28664/) (2026)
- [N0-Foundation: Towards the Age of Tactile Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29601/) (2026)
- [DexTouch-WM: Learning Action-Conditioned Tactile World Models from Human Touch for Dexterous Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20649/) (2026)
- [TACROSS: An Efficient and Low-Cost Scalable Human Touch System Across Heterogeneous Tactile Sensors for Dexterous Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11945/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Enabling robots with contact-rich manipulation remains a pivotal challenge in robot learning, which is substantially hindered by the data collection gap, including its inefficiency and limited sensor setup. While prior work has explored handheld paradigms, their rod-based mechanical structures remain rigid and unintuitive, providing limited tactile feedback and posing challenges for operators. Motivated by the dexterity and force feedback of human motion, we propose FreeTacMan, a human-centric and robot-free data collection system for accurate and efficient robot manipulation. Concretely, we design a wearable gripper with visuo-tactile sensors for data collection, which can be worn by human fingers for intuitive control. A high-precision optical tracking system is introduced to capture end-effector poses while synchronizing visual and tactile feedback simultaneously. We leverage FreeTacMan to collect a large-scale multimodal dataset, comprising over 3000k paired visuo-tactile images with end-effector poses, 10k demonstration trajectories across 50 diverse contact-rich manipulation tasks. FreeTacMan achieves multiple improvements in data collection performance over prior works and enables effective policy learning from self-collected datasets. By open-sourcing the hardware and the dataset, we aim to facilitate reproducibility and support research in visuo-tactile manipulation.