FACTR 2

FACTR 2: Neural External Torque Estimation enables force-aware robot policy learning without dedicated sensors

Researchers introduce NEXT (Neural External Torque Estimation), a data-driven method that estimates external joint torques on commodity robot arms without dedicated force sensors, training in one minute from ten minutes of free-motion data. Combined with Force-Informed Re-Sampling Training (FIRST), which up-samples contact segments during behavior cloning, the system outperforms prior force-aware policies by over 17% in task progress across five long-horizon manipulation tasks. The work lowers the hardware barrier for contact-rich robot manipulation by bringing force-feedback teleoperation and policy learning to off-the-shelf arms.