CompliantVLA-adaptor: VLM-Guided Variable Impedance Action for Safe Contact-Rich Manipulation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15541v2
• Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2026 16:34:11 GMT
• Title: CompliantVLA-adaptor: VLM-Guided Variable Impedance Action for Safe Contact-Rich Manipulation
• Abstract summary: We propose a CompliantVLA-adaptor that augments the state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models with vision-language model (VLM)-informed context-aware variable impedance control (VIC)<n>Existing VLA systems (e.g., RDT, Pi0.5, OpenVLA-oft) typically output position, but lack force-aware adaptation, leading to unsafe or failed interactions in physical tasks involving contact, compliance, or uncertainty.<n>We demonstrate that our method outperforms the VLA baselines on a suite of complex contact-rich tasks, both in
• Score: 35.15898666328117
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: We propose a CompliantVLA-adaptor that augments the state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models with vision-language model (VLM)-informed context-aware variable impedance control (VIC) to improve the safety and effectiveness of contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks. Existing VLA systems (e.g., RDT, Pi0.5, OpenVLA-oft) typically output position, but lack force-aware adaptation, leading to unsafe or failed interactions in physical tasks involving contact, compliance, or uncertainty. In the proposed CompliantVLA-adaptor, a VLM interprets task context from images and natural language to adapt the stiffness and damping parameters of a VIC controller. These parameters are further regulated using real-time force/torque feedback to ensure interaction forces remain within safe thresholds. We demonstrate that our method outperforms the VLA baselines on a suite of complex contact-rich tasks, both in simulation and the real world, with improved success rates and reduced force violations. This work presents a promising path towards a safe foundation model for physical contact-rich manipulation. We release our code, prompts, and force-torque-impedance-scenario context datasets at https://sites.google.com/view/compliantvla.

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