Compliant Residual DAgger: Improving Real-World Contact-Rich Manipulation with Human Corrections

We address key challenges in Dataset Aggregation (DAgger) for real-world contact-rich manipulation: how to collect informative human correction data and how to effectively update policies with this new data. We introduce Compliant Residual DAgger (CR-DAgger), which contains two novel components: 1) a Compliant Intervention Interface that leverages compliance control, allowing humans to provide gentle, accurate delta action corrections without interrupting the ongoing robot policy execution; and 2) a Compliant Residual Policy formulation that learns from human corrections while incorporating force feedback and force control. Our system significantly enhances performance on precise contact-rich manipulation tasks using minimal correction data, improving base policy success rates by over 50\% on two challenging tasks (book flipping and belt assembly) while outperforming both retraining-from-scratch and finetuning approaches. Through extensive real-world experiments, we provide practical guidance for implementing effective DAgger in real-world robot learning tasks. Result videos are available at:this https URL

@article{xu2025_2506.16685,
  title={ Compliant Residual DAgger: Improving Real-World Contact-Rich Manipulation with Human Corrections },
  author={ Xiaomeng Xu and Yifan Hou and Zeyi Liu and Shuran Song },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.16685},
  year={ 2025 }
}