Tactile-Based Robotic Manipulation: From Mechanics-Driven to Data-Driven Perspectives

Tactile sensing provides robots with direct access to physical interactions at the contact interface, making it a critical modality for robust and dexterous manipulation. Over the past several decades, tactile-based manipulation research has evolved from mechanics-driven approaches, which explicitly interpret tactile signals through contact mechanics and task-specific reasoning, to data-driven approaches that learn tactile representations and manipulation policies directly from data. This article reviews the development of tactile-based manipulation from these two complementary perspectives. We first introduce the fundamentals of tactile sensing and then review, from a mechanics-driven perspective, how those signals form manipulation-relevant state representations and subsequently influence the robot action. We then examine the recent advances in data-driven tactile manipulation, covering imitation learning, reinforcement learning, vision–language–action models, and predictive models. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future opportunities toward scalable, generalizable, and robust tactile-enabled robotic systems.