CR-VLA-Force: Learning Control-aware Compliance VLA Model for Robust Contact-rich Robotic Manipulation

Abstract

Integrating visuomotor policies or Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models with force/torque (F/T) perception has demonstrated significant progress in imitation learning for robotic manipulation. However, existing force-aware VLA models frequently exhibit limited capability in precise force tracking and rapid successive adjustments. This deficiency stems from the limitations of action-chunk execution strategies and the substantial latency between perception and real-time control. Such limitations can lead to task failures and safety risks, particularly when the execution of an action chunk exerts excessive interaction forces without timely adjustment. To overcome this challenge, we propose the Control-aware Compliance VLA (CC-VLA) framework for reactive control. The CC-VLA model employs a multimodal mixture-of-experts (MoE) to encode force signal sequences and vision-language fused feature. Furthermore, it utilizes a multi-stage training strategy to ensure robust perception within the visual-semantic space and effective force perception under sparse sampling conditions. Additionally, a VLA-guided adaptive compliance controller is designed to facilitate precise position tracking during contact-free motion and optimal force-position tracking for contact-rich tasks. To facilitate high-precision F/T data acquisition, we also implement an adversaria shared teleoperation strategy for contact-rich demonstrations that bolsters system safety and interactivity. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that CC-VLA significantly improves success rates in challenging force-perception tasks and enhances force-control precision, while providing multi-level safety and robustness under the tested partial-OOD pose-shift settings.