# FELT: Generating Tactile Signals from Vision for Visuo-Tactile Manipulation

- Source: arXiv cs.RO
- Published: 2026-10-19T04:00:00.000Z
- RoboHot: https://robohot.news/en/items/jkiqzylmshphi2kjrc3844f76
- Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20683

## Summary

FELT is a framework that uses existing paired visuo-tactile data to learn contact-aware representations from RGB observations, providing them to downstream policies through two interfaces: generated tactile images and contact-aware features. It combines a frozen visual encoder with separate query decoders for the left and right fingers, and the two branches exchange information through gated connections, with a convolutional readout producing spatial contact representations. On four contact-intensive real-robot tasks, both interfaces achieved higher success rates than vision-only policies, and directly integrating contact-aware features into policies raised success rates by 15-22.5 percentage points.