A survey on imitation learning for contact-rich tasks in robotics

Toshiaki Tsuji, Yasuhiro Kato, Gokhan Solak, Heng Zhang, Tadej Petrič, Francesco Nori, Arash Ajoudani, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Saitama University, Center for Education and Research in Information Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction Lab, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, PhD. Program of National Interest in Robotics and Intelligent Machines , and Università di Genova, Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Department of Automatics, Biocybernetics and Robotics, Jožef Stefan Institute, Robotics lab, Google Deepmind

The International Journal of Robotics Research

Published online on March 14, 2026

Abstract

The International Journal of Robotics Research, Ahead of Print.
This paper comprehensively surveys research trends in imitation learning (IL) for contact-rich robotic tasks. Contact-rich tasks, which require complex physical interactions with the environment, represent a central challenge in robotics due to their ...