Proud of @madrish02 and the entire team's work on TACTIC. What I find most compelling about TACTIC is that contact is not treated as just another sensor input or a penalty term, it is built into every layer of the planning stack. In the representation, RGB-D, proprioception, and distributed tactile sensing are fused through a proximity mask that focuses the model on the interaction geometry that actually matters: where contact is happening, and where it may happen next. In sampling, contact Jacobians shape MPPI exploration, biasing candidate actions toward directions that can meaningfully regulate forces and steering unsafe samples away from high-force contacts. In prediction, hybrid rollouts combine learned interaction dynamics with analytical robot kinematics: learn what is hard to model, while preserving the structure we already know. Interestingly, this hybrid variant idea that adds a kinematics-based goal cost during planning also improves planning with other learned world models, including V-JEPA2 on Reach and DINO-WM on Granular. And in scoring, trajectories are evaluated not only for task progress, but also for contact evolution, force regulation, joint limits, and collisions. That contact-centricity across representation, sampling, prediction, and scoring is, to me, the most exciting part of TACTIC. Very proud of the team and excited to see this work at #RSS2026! @EmpriseLab @Cornell_Bowers @Cornell_CS

EmPRISE Lab will have a strong presence at #RSS2026, with 5 main-conference papers plus workshop papers, talks, and panels. Here’s where to find our main conference work: Monday, July 13: Session "World Models and Memory" Check out RAG-Diff, led by @Nekovowo. RAG-Diff is a retrieval-augmented framework for adapting a frozen diffusion policy at test time to dynamic, personalized user preferences in caregiving-like environments. It retrieves relevant examples and constraints from a memory bank (PrefMem), using in-place attention re-computation (I-Atten) for implicit preferences and value guidance for explicit preferences. Website: emprise.cs.cornell.edu/rag-d… Tuesday, July 14: Session "Manipulation 2" Check out TACTIC, led by @madrish02. TACTIC is a receding-horizon controller for whole-arm manipulation. TACTIC combines vision and distributed tactile sensing in a contact-centric representation, then uses contact-aware action sampling and a hybrid latent/analytical predictive model to balance task progress with whole-arm force regulation. Website: emprise.cs.cornell.edu/tacti… Wednesday, July 15: Session "HRI" @ZhanxinWu0725 will present E2Care, a context-aware physical caregiving system designed to operate safely across changing tasks, environments, and robot embodiments. It treats caregiving primitives as interaction templates that can be reshaped online according to context. Website: emprise.cs.cornell.edu/e2car… @jiaying_fang0 will present E-MPC: An Engagement-Aware Human-in-the-Loop Framework for Robotic Systems. E-MPC recognizes that task success alone is insufficient for human-centered robots: users may still feel passive, disengaged, or overloaded. It jointly reasons about task success, engagement, and workload to decide when and how to involve the user. Website: emprise.cs.cornell.edu/empc Finally, check out “Knowing When Not to Help," led by @RealZiangLiu and Yunting Yan, exploring a central challenge in robot-assisted caregiving: providing help only when it is needed. Its Bayesian active-learning framework combines biomechanical models, clinical knowledge, and LLM-guided priors to learn user-specific reachability online and support “just-right” assistance while maintaining reliable task performance. Website: emprise.cs.cornell.edu/human… You can also find us at the workshops: • Rethinking What It Means to Be Safe for Generalist Robots • Beyond the Lab: Rethinking Methods for Human Behavior Monitoring and Modeling in In-the-Wild HRI • Towards Robust Execution of Long-Horizon Whole-Body Control Tasks • Planning and Control with Imperfect Sensors and Perception Due to visa complications, Ruolin, Rishabh, and Yunting will not be attending in person. Zhanxin, Jiaying, Joyce Yang, and I will be there, and will also present on their behalf. Come say hi! :-) @EmpriseLab @Cornell_CS @Cornell_Bowers