Daily Papers

While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated promising generalization capabilities in robotic manipulation, deploying them on specific and complex downstream tasks still demands effective post-training. In parallel, Human-in-the-Loop (HiL) learning has proven to be a powerful mechanism for refining robot policies. However, extending this paradigm to dexterous manipulation remains challenging: multi-finger control is high-dimensional, contact-intensive, and exhibits execution distributions that differ markedly from standard arm motions, leaving existing dexterous VLA systems limited in reliability and adaptability. We present DexHiL, the first integrated arm-hand human-in-the-loop framework for dexterous VLA models, enabling coordinated interventions over the arm and the dexterous hand within a single system. DexHiL introduces an intervention-aware data sampling strategy that prioritizes corrective segments for post-training, alongside a lightweight teleoperation interface that supports instantaneous human corrections during execution. Real-robot experiments demonstrate that DexHiL serves as an effective post-training framework, yielding a substantial performance leap, outperforming standard offline-only fine-tuning baselines by an average of 25% in success rates across distinct tasks. Project page: https://chenzhongxi-sjtu.github.io/dexhil/

Human-like dexterous hands with multiple fingers offer human-level manipulation capabilities, but training control policies that can directly deploy on real hardware remains difficult due to contact-rich physics and imperfect actuation. We close this gap with a practical sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) framework that utilizes dense tactile feedback combined with joint torque sensing to explicitly regulate physical interactions. To enable effective sim-to-real transfer, we introduce (i) a computationally fast tactile simulation that computes distances between dense virtual tactile units and the object via parallel forward kinematics, providing high-rate, high-resolution touch signals needed by RL; (ii) a current-to-torque calibration that eliminates the need for torque sensors on dexterous hands by mapping motor current to joint torque; and (iii) actuator dynamics modeling to bridge the actuation gaps with randomization of non-ideal effects such as backlash, torque-speed saturation. Using an asymmetric actor-critic PPO pipeline trained entirely in simulation, our policies deploy directly to a five-finger hand. The resulting policies demonstrated two essential skills: (1) command-based, controllable grasp force tracking, and (2) reorientation of objects in the hand, both of which were robustly executed without fine-tuning on the robot. By combining tactile and torque in the observation space with effective sensing/actuation modeling, our system provides a practical solution to achieve reliable dexterous manipulation. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of controllable grasping on a multi-finger dexterous hand trained entirely in simulation and transferred zero-shot on real hardware.

Despite decades of research, general purpose in-hand manipulation remains one of the unsolved challenges of robotics. One of the contributing factors that limit current robotic manipulation systems is the difficulty of precisely sensing contact forces -- sensing and reasoning about contact forces are crucial to accurately control interactions with the environment. As a step towards enabling better robotic manipulation, we introduce DIGIT, an inexpensive, compact, and high-resolution tactile sensor geared towards in-hand manipulation. DIGIT improves upon past vision-based tactile sensors by miniaturizing the form factor to be mountable on multi-fingered hands, and by providing several design improvements that result in an easier, more repeatable manufacturing process, and enhanced reliability. We demonstrate the capabilities of the DIGIT sensor by training deep neural network model-based controllers to manipulate glass marbles in-hand with a multi-finger robotic hand. To provide the robotic community access to reliable and low-cost tactile sensors, we open-source the DIGIT design at https://digit.ml/.

We use reinforcement learning (RL) to learn dexterous in-hand manipulation policies which can perform vision-based object reorientation on a physical Shadow Dexterous Hand. The training is performed in a simulated environment in which we randomize many of the physical properties of the system like friction coefficients and an object's appearance. Our policies transfer to the physical robot despite being trained entirely in simulation. Our method does not rely on any human demonstrations, but many behaviors found in human manipulation emerge naturally, including finger gaiting, multi-finger coordination, and the controlled use of gravity. Our results were obtained using the same distributed RL system that was used to train OpenAI Five. We also include a video of our results: https://youtu.be/jwSbzNHGflM

We present a novel approach to synthesize dexterous motions for physically simulated hands in tasks that require coordination between the control of two hands with high temporal precision. Instead of directly learning a joint policy to control two hands, our approach performs bimanual control through cooperative learning where each hand is treated as an individual agent. The individual policies for each hand are first trained separately, and then synchronized through latent space manipulation in a centralized environment to serve as a joint policy for two-hand control. By doing so, we avoid directly performing policy learning in the joint state-action space of two hands with higher dimensions, greatly improving the overall training efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in the challenging guitar-playing task. The virtual guitarist trained by our approach can synthesize motions from unstructured reference data of general guitar-playing practice motions, and accurately play diverse rhythms with complex chord pressing and string picking patterns based on the input guitar tabs that do not exist in the references. Along with this paper, we provide the motion capture data that we collected as the reference for policy training. Code is available at: https://pei-xu.github.io/guitar.

With rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence, the text-to-music synthesis task has emerged as a promising direction for music generation from scratch. However, finer-grained control over multi-track generation remains an open challenge. Existing models exhibit strong raw generation capability but lack the flexibility to compose separate tracks and combine them in a controllable manner, differing from typical workflows of human composers. To address this issue, we propose JEN-1 Composer, a unified framework to efficiently model marginal, conditional, and joint distributions over multi-track music via a single model. JEN-1 Composer framework exhibits the capacity to seamlessly incorporate any diffusion-based music generation system, e.g. Jen-1, enhancing its capacity for versatile multi-track music generation. We introduce a curriculum training strategy aimed at incrementally instructing the model in the transition from single-track generation to the flexible generation of multi-track combinations. During the inference, users have the ability to iteratively produce and choose music tracks that meet their preferences, subsequently creating an entire musical composition incrementally following the proposed Human-AI co-composition workflow. Quantitative and qualitative assessments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in controllable and high-fidelity multi-track music synthesis. The proposed JEN-1 Composer represents a significant advance toward interactive AI-facilitated music creation and composition. Demos will be available at https://jenmusic.ai/audio-demos.

Large language model(LLM)-driven multi-agent systems(MAS) coordinate specialized agents through predefined interaction topologies and have shown promise for complex tasks such as competition-level code generation. Recent studies demonstrate that carefully designed multi-agent workflows and communication graphs can significantly improve code generation performance by leveraging collaborative reasoning. However, existing methods neither adapt topology density to task difficulty nor iteratively refine the topology within an instance using execution feedback, which leads to redundant communication and performance bottlenecks. To address these issues, we propose AgentConductor: a reinforcement learning-optimized MAS with an LLM-based orchestrator agent as its core, which enables end-to-end feedback-driven dynamic generation of interaction topologies. For each query, AgentConductor infers agent roles and task difficulty, then constructs a task-adapted, density-aware layered directed acyclic graph (DAG) topology, underpinned by two key innovations. First, we design a novel topological density function that captures communication-aware mathematical characterizations of multi-agent interactions. Second, we adopt difficulty interval partitioning to avoid excessive pruning for precise topological density upper bound measurement per difficulty level and finer-grained control. Empirically, across three competition-level and two foundational code datasets, AgentConductor achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, outperforming the strongest baseline by up to 14.6% in pass@1 accuracy, 13% in density reduction, and 68% in token cost reduction.

In this paper, we address force-aware control and force distribution in robotic platforms with multi-fingered hands. Given a target goal and force estimates from tactile sensors, we design a controller that adapts the motion of the torso, arm, wrist, and fingers, redistributing forces to maintain stable contact with objects of varying mass distribution or unstable contacts. To estimate forces, we collect a dataset of tactile signals and ground-truth force measurements using five Xela magnetic sensors interacting with indenters, and train force estimators. We then introduce a model-based control scheme that minimizes the distance between the Center of Pressure (CoP) and the centroid of the fingertips contact polygon. Since our method relies on estimated forces rather than raw tactile signals, it has the potential to be applied to any sensor capable of force estimation. We validate our framework on a balancing task with five objects, achieving a 82.7% success rate, and further evaluate it in multi-object scenarios, achieving 80% accuracy. Code and data can be found here https://github.com/hsp-iit/multifingered-force-aware-control.

Contact-rich dexterous manipulation with multi-finger hands remains an open challenge in robotics because task success depends on multi-point contacts that continuously evolve and are highly sensitive to object geometry, frictional transitions, and slip. Recently, tactile-informed manipulation policies have shown promise. However, most use tactile signals as additional observations rather than modeling contact state or how their action outputs interact with low-level controller dynamics. We present Contact-Grounded Policy (CGP), a visuotactile policy that grounds multi-point contacts by predicting coupled trajectories of actual robot state and tactile feedback, and using a learned contact-consistency mapping to convert these predictions into executable target robot states for a compliance controller. CGP consists of two components: (i) a conditional diffusion model that forecasts future robot state and tactile feedback in a compressed latent space, and (ii) a learned contact-consistency mapping that converts the predicted robot state-tactile pair into executable targets for a compliance controller, enabling it to realize the intended contacts. We evaluate CGP using a physical four-finger Allegro V5 hand with Digit360 fingertip tactile sensors, and a simulated five-finger Tesollo DG-5F hand with dense whole-hand tactile arrays. Across a range of dexterous tasks including in-hand manipulation, delicate grasping, and tool use, CGP outperforms visuomotor and visuotactile diffusion-policy baselines.

Dexterous hands exhibit significant potential for complex real-world grasping tasks. While recent studies have primarily focused on learning policies for specific robotic hands, the development of a universal policy that controls diverse dexterous hands remains largely unexplored. In this work, we study the learning of cross-embodiment dexterous grasping policies using reinforcement learning (RL). Inspired by the capability of human hands to control various dexterous hands through teleoperation, we propose a universal action space based on the human hand's eigengrasps. The policy outputs eigengrasp actions that are then converted into specific joint actions for each robot hand through a retargeting mapping. We simplify the robot hand's proprioception to include only the positions of fingertips and the palm, offering a unified observation space across different robot hands. Our approach demonstrates an 80% success rate in grasping objects from the YCB dataset across four distinct embodiments using a single vision-based policy. Additionally, our policy exhibits zero-shot generalization to two previously unseen embodiments and significant improvement in efficient finetuning. For further details and videos, visit our project page https://sites.google.com/view/crossdex.

Dexterous manipulation with multi-fingered hands is the next frontier of robotics, yet learned hand skills remain limited to simple grasps or basic repeated motions, such as rotating an object. As robots attempt more demanding in-hand maneuvers, safety, such as not dropping the object, becomes critical, yet it is rarely measured. We study in-hand object pose reaching, a task that demands diverse and difficult grasps: moving an object to almost any position and orientation within reach of the fingers, at any wrist orientation, through long sequences of consecutive goals. We present a recipe for training such policies for a LEAP hand in simulation without human data, built on a range of insights, from diverse resets and goals via generated grasp datasets to an adaptive friction curriculum. With careful system identification, the policies transfer zero-shot to the real hand, using either motion capture or a single wrist-mounted depth camera, and prove remarkably capable and robust. On top of the task policy, we add a learned residual safety filter with adjustable conservativeness, letting us tune the balance between performance and safety and greatly reduce object drops. In 13.3 hours of real-robot evaluation over 4,800 unseen goals across 4 objects and diverse wrist orientations, the state-based policy reaches 95.2% of goals within 2 cm and 0.4 rad, and the filter cuts its drops by 75% while still reaching 91.5% of goals. The policies can also spin a lightbulb held in an arbitrary pose, reach out-of-distribution goals, withstand fast arm motion and perturbations, and, needing only a wrist camera, serve as portable skills such as screwing in a lightbulb. We release the full recipe as a platform for studying performance, reliability, and safety in high-dimensional dexterous systems. Videos and more are available at https://ian-chuang.github.io/dexsafe/.

We present a data-driven approach for physics-based, muscle-driven dexterous control that enables musculoskeletal hands to perform precise piano playing for novel pieces of music outside the reference dataset. Our approach combines high-frequency muscle-level control with low-frequency latent-space coordination in a hierarchical architecture. At the low level, general single-hand policies are trained via reinforcement learning to generate dynamic muscle-tendon activations while tracking trajectories from a large reference motion dataset. The resulting tracking policies are then distilled into variational autoencoder (VAE) models, yielding smooth and structured latent spaces that abstract away low-level muscle dynamics. For the high level, we train piece-specific policies to operate in this latent space, coordinating bimanual motions based on specific goals, denoted by note events extracted from given musical scores, to synthesize performances beyond the reference data. In addition, we present an enhanced musculoskeletal hand model that supports fine control of fingers for accurate low-level motion tracking and diverse high-level motion synthesis. We evaluate the control pipeline of our approach on a diverse piano repertoire spanning multiple musical styles and technical demands. Results demonstrate that our approach can synthesize coordinated bimanual motions with accurate key presses, and achieve the state-of-the-art performance of piano playing in physics-based dexterous control. We also show that our musculoskeletal hand model demonstrates superior biomechanical stability and tracking precision compared to the existing model, and validate that our musculoskeletal hand model and muscle-driven controller can generate physiologically plausible activation patterns that align with human electromyography (EMG) recordings.

Human dexterity is a hallmark of motor control. Our hands can rapidly synthesize new behaviors despite the complexity (multi-articular and multi-joints, with 23 joints controlled by more than 40 muscles) of musculoskeletal sensory-motor circuits. In this work, we take inspiration from how human dexterity builds on a diversity of prior experiences, instead of being acquired through a single task. Motivated by this observation, we set out to develop agents that can build upon their previous experience to quickly acquire new (previously unattainable) behaviors. Specifically, our approach leverages multi-task learning to implicitly capture task-agnostic behavioral priors (MyoDex) for human-like dexterity, using a physiologically realistic human hand model - MyoHand. We demonstrate MyoDex's effectiveness in few-shot generalization as well as positive transfer to a large repertoire of unseen dexterous manipulation tasks. Agents leveraging MyoDex can solve approximately 3x more tasks, and 4x faster in comparison to a distillation baseline. While prior work has synthesized single musculoskeletal control behaviors, MyoDex is the first generalizable manipulation prior that catalyzes the learning of dexterous physiological control across a large variety of contact-rich behaviors. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our paradigms beyond musculoskeletal control towards the acquisition of dexterity in 24 DoF Adroit Hand. Website: https://sites.google.com/view/myodex

A hallmark of human dexterity is the cooperative use of fingers, where different fingers take on distinct yet coordinated roles to accomplish fine manipu- lation, such as capping a pen with the hand that holds it. We study this finger-level coordination through in-hand assembly: mating two rigid objects within a single dexterous hand, with no second arm and no fixture. We present a reinforcement learning formulation to solve this problem in a unified framework, which is driven by a goal relative pose between the two parts. Finger coordination is shaped by a function-based auxiliary reward and regularized toward a single human reference pose, while domain randomization and a fusion of historical proprioception and object observation confer robustness to occlusion-induced estimation noise. The same recipe solves three different assembly tasks (Bottle, Syringe, and Marker). Trained purely in simulation, the policies transfer zero-shot to hardware with a single camera, demonstrating robustness to state-estimation errors caused by oc- clusion. Our experiments also reveal that in-hand assembly places demands on hand morphology and can serve as a benchmark for modern robotic hand systems. Videos and code are available at https://ltbgbird.github.io/in-hand-assembly-page/.

Supernumerary robotic fingers augment human dexterity by enabling a single hand to perform complex "hold-and-manipulate" tasks that typically require bimanual coordination. However, existing devices are often hindered by bulky hardware that limits interaction to large objects and rely on explicit hand motion triggers that lack environmental context. To address these challenges, we present EgoThumb, a fully open-source, vision-driven supernumerary robotic thumb. EgoThumb features a compact, dual tendon-driven finger whose actuation is relocated to the forearm, reducing distal weight while enabling precise active joint control. The system utilizes a visual imitation learning policy that maps egocentric images from a palm-facing camera directly to continuous joint positions. By implicitly decoding human intent from visual cues capturing both the hand and the object of interest, EgoThumb achieves robust autonomous manipulation and strong generalization across diverse users and environments. All hardware designs and software implementations are fully open-sourced at https://ego-thumb.github.io.

Manipulating objects to achieve desired goal states is a basic but important skill for dexterous manipulation. Human hand motions demonstrate proficient manipulation capability, providing valuable data for training robots with multi-finger hands. Despite this potential, substantial challenges arise due to the embodiment gap between human and robot hands. In this work, we introduce a hierarchical policy learning framework that uses human hand motion data for training object-centric dexterous robot manipulation. At the core of our method is a high-level trajectory generative model, learned with a large-scale human hand motion capture dataset, to synthesize human-like wrist motions conditioned on the desired object goal states. Guided by the generated wrist motions, deep reinforcement learning is further used to train a low-level finger controller that is grounded in the robot's embodiment to physically interact with the object to achieve the goal. Through extensive evaluation across 10 household objects, our approach not only demonstrates superior performance but also showcases generalization capability to novel object geometries and goal states. Furthermore, we transfer the learned policies from simulation to a real-world bimanual dexterous robot system, further demonstrating its applicability in real-world scenarios. Project website: https://cypypccpy.github.io/obj-dex.github.io/.

We introduce the Grasp EveryThing (GET) gripper, a novel 1-DoF, 3-finger design for securely grasping objects of many shapes and sizes. Mounted on a standard parallel jaw actuator, the design features three narrow, tapered fingers arranged in a two-against-one configuration, where the two fingers converge into a V-shape. The GET gripper is more capable of conforming to object geometries and forming secure grasps than traditional designs with two flat fingers. Inspired by the principle of self-similarity, these V-shaped fingers enable secure grasping across a wide range of object sizes. Further to this end, fingers are parametrically designed for convenient resizing and interchangeability across robotic embodiments with a parallel jaw gripper. Additionally, we incorporate a rigid fingernail for ease in manipulating small objects. Tactile sensing can be integrated into the standalone finger via an externally-mounted camera. A neural network was trained to estimate normal force from tactile images with an average validation error of 1.3 N across a diverse set of geometries. In grasping 15 objects and performing 3 tasks via teleoperation, the GET fingers consistently outperformed standard flat fingers. All finger designs, compatible with multiple robotic embodiments, both incorporating and lacking tactile sensing, are available on GitHub.

Dexterous hands enable concurrent prehensile and nonprehensile manipulation, such as holding one object while interacting with another, a capability essential for everyday tasks yet underexplored in robotics. Learning such long-horizon, contact-rich multi-stage behaviors is challenging because demonstrations are expensive to collect and end-to-end policies require substantial data to generalize across varied object geometries and placements. We present DexMulti, a sample-efficient approach for real-world dexterous multi-task manipulation that decomposes demonstrations into object-centric skills with well-defined temporal boundaries. Rather than learning monolithic policies, our method retrieves demonstrated skills based on current object geometry, aligns them to the observed object state using an uncertainty-aware estimator that tracks centroid and yaw, and executes them via a retrieve-align-execute paradigm. We evaluate on three multi-stage tasks requiring concurrent manipulation (Grasp + Pull, Grasp + Open, and Grasp + Grasp) across two dexterous hands (Allegro and LEAP) in over 1,000 real-world trials. Our approach achieves an average success rate of 66% on training objects with only 3-4 demonstrations per object, outperforming diffusion policy baselines by 2-3x while requiring far fewer demonstrations. Results demonstrate robust generalization to held-out objects and spatial variations up to +/-25 cm.

As dexterous hands proliferate, collecting data and training policies separately for every morphology becomes increasingly impractical. Scalable cross-embodiment learning therefore requires a unified representation that captures shared manipulation structure while preserving morphology-specific control. Differences in hands, tasks, datasets, and control interfaces prevent existing studies from isolating the effects of representation, pretraining, and architecture. We introduce DexJoCo-X, a benchmark and toolkit for controlled comparison across seven representative dexterous hands, six single-arm and bimanual tasks, and 2,100 balanced demonstrations. DexJoCo-X provides a matched multi-hand, multi-task protocol with common scenes, success criteria, and execution interfaces, redesigned glove-to-hand mappings, and an automated pipeline that expands reviewed demonstrations across randomized scenes. Using π_{0.5}, Ego-Pi, and Being-H0.5, we examine whether a shared action interface is sufficient for multi-hand learning. Expanding π_{0.5} to an 80-dimensional bimanual output yields near-zero success. Ego-Pi preserves the pretrained action head through interleaved prediction and supports per-hand multi-task learning, but remains ineffective for seven-hand joint training. By contrast, Being-H0.5 combines cross-embodiment pretraining, a unified action space, and embodiment-aware experts, enabling one policy to control all seven hands. Within this architecture, function-aligned action slots achieve 47.7% mean success, compared with 47.0% for native coordinates and 33.1% for DexLatent. These results show that cross-embodiment representation depends on the entire learning system: action coordinates, pretraining, and architecture must jointly separate shared manipulation structure from embodiment-specific control.

Imitation learning provides a promising approach to dexterous hand manipulation, but its effectiveness is limited by the lack of large-scale, high-fidelity data. Existing data-collection pipelines suffer from inaccurate motion retargeting, low data-collection efficiency, and missing high-resolution fingertip tactile sensing. We address this gap with MILE, a mechanically isomorphic teleoperation and data-collection system co-designed from human hand to exoskeleton to robotic hand. The exoskeleton is anthropometrically derived from the human hand, and the robotic hand preserves one-to-one joint-position isomorphism, eliminating nonlinear retargeting and enabling precise, natural control. The exoskeleton achieves a multi-joint mean absolute angular error below one degree, while the robotic hand integrates compact fingertip visuotactile modules that provide high-resolution tactile observations. Built on this retargeting-free interface, we teleoperate complex, contact-rich in-hand manipulation and efficiently collect a multimodal dataset comprising high-resolution fingertip visuotactile signals, RGB-D images, and joint positions. The teleoperation pipeline achieves a mean success rate improvement of 64%. Incorporating fingertip tactile observations further increases the success rate by an average of 25% over the vision-only baseline, validating the fidelity and utility of the dataset. Further details are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/mile-system.

Multi-fingered robotic hands have potential to enable robots to perform sophisticated manipulation tasks. However, teaching a robot to grasp objects with an anthropomorphic hand is an arduous problem due to the high dimensionality of state and action spaces. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) offers techniques to design control policies for this kind of problems without explicit environment or hand modeling. However, state-of-the-art model-free algorithms have proven inefficient for learning such policies. The main problem is that the exploration of the environment is unfeasible for such high-dimensional problems, thus hampering the initial phases of policy optimization. One possibility to address this is to rely on off-line task demonstrations, but, oftentimes, this is too demanding in terms of time and computational resources. To address these problems, we propose the A Grasp Pose is All You Need (G-PAYN) method for the anthropomorphic hand of the iCub humanoid. We develop an approach to automatically collect task demonstrations to initialize the training of the policy. The proposed grasping pipeline starts from a grasp pose generated by an external algorithm, used to initiate the movement. Then a control policy (previously trained with the proposed G-PAYN) is used to reach and grab the object. We deployed the iCub into the MuJoCo simulator and use it to test our approach with objects from the YCB-Video dataset. Results show that G-PAYN outperforms current DRL techniques in the considered setting in terms of success rate and execution time with respect to the baselines. The code to reproduce the experiments is released together with the paper with an open source license.

Manipulating a Rubik's Cube with a single dexterous hand is a challenging test of sustained, contact-rich control: the hand must execute successive layer turns while keeping the cube secure. Each turn requires some fingers to support the cube while others push a moving layer, release contact, and reset for the next move. To learn this coordination, we introduce FINGR (Future-supervised Interaction Network with Geometric Representations), a policy that combines finger-relative geometry with future interaction prediction. A shared point encoder expresses the cube relative to each fingertip and aggregates its points without depending on cubie indexing. Learned future tokens share the observation encoder and receive supervision for contact-force changes, layer-turn progress, and finger joint displacement at multiple time scales. The resulting representation conditions a flow policy that directly generates finger actions. On a real dexterous hand, our policy achieves 99.0% success over 300 turn attempts, compared with 79.7% for the base flow policy. Integrated with grasping and table-assisted regrasping, the policy solves all ten scrambled 2times2times2 cubes in a mean complete-system time of approximately 137 seconds. The project website is available at https://www.lyt0112.com/projects/FINGR

Humans routinely wield tools, swap grasps, and reposition objects within a single hand, seamlessly orchestrating contact transitions that span translation, reorientation, and finger gaiting. Endowing robot dexterous hands with this level of in-hand dexterity through teleoperation requires precise control of object motion via dynamic hand-object contact, yet current teleoperation systems remain far from this capability. To bridge this gap, we take a major step towards human-level dexterous teleoperation by introducing TeleDexter, a hand-object co-tracking controller that maps operator intent into learned, low-level contact execution. The controller is trained on consecutive co-tracking subgoals derived from human reference motions, utilizing a hybrid reward that couples sparse subgoal objectives with dense tracking rewards to enable learning across diverse interaction modalities rather than frame-wise trajectory imitation. The entire pipeline requires only single-stage RL and, with random action masking and domain randomization, transfers zero-shot to the real robot. We evaluate TeleDexter on seven challenging dexterous teleoperation tasks spanning object reorientation and long-horizon tool use across two dexterous hands, achieving a 75% average success rate where all baselines consistently fail. Furthermore, the collected demonstrations successfully train autonomous policies via behavioral cloning, marking a concrete step towards human-level dexterous teleoperation.

Flow-based vision-language-action (VLA) models excel in embodied control but suffer from intractable likelihoods during multi-step sampling, hindering online reinforcement learning. We propose \textit{boldsymbolπ-StepNFT} (Step-wise Negative-aware Fine-Tuning), a critic-and-likelihood-free framework that requires only a single forward pass per optimization step and eliminates auxiliary value networks. We identify that wider exploration spaces necessitate finer-grained, step-wise guidance for alignment. Empirically, π-StepNFT unlocks latent potential on LIBERO with competitive few-shot robustness. Moreover, it achieves superior generalization on ManiSkill, outperforming value-based baselines in OOD scenarios by preventing overfitting to multimodal features. This property offers a scalable solution promising for complex real-world applications.

Deep generative models have various content creation applications such as graphic design, e-commerce, and virtual Try-on. However, current works mainly focus on synthesizing realistic visual outputs, often ignoring other sensory modalities, such as touch, which limits physical interaction with users. In this work, we leverage deep generative models to create a multi-sensory experience where users can touch and see the synthesized object when sliding their fingers on a haptic surface. The main challenges lie in the significant scale discrepancy between vision and touch sensing and the lack of explicit mapping from touch sensing data to a haptic rendering device. To bridge this gap, we collect high-resolution tactile data with a GelSight sensor and create a new visuotactile clothing dataset. We then develop a conditional generative model that synthesizes both visual and tactile outputs from a single sketch. We evaluate our method regarding image quality and tactile rendering accuracy. Finally, we introduce a pipeline to render high-quality visual and tactile outputs on an electroadhesion-based haptic device for an immersive experience, allowing for challenging materials and editable sketch inputs.

Hand tracking is a critical component of natural user interactions in extended reality (XR) environments, including extended reality musical instruments (XRMIs). However, self-occlusion remains a significant challenge for vision-based hand tracking systems, leading to inaccurate results and degraded user experiences. In this paper, we propose a multimodal hand tracking system that combines vision-based hand tracking with surface electromyography (sEMG) data for finger joint angle estimation. We validate the effectiveness of our system through a series of hand pose tasks designed to cover a wide range of gestures, including those prone to self-occlusion. By comparing the performance of our multimodal system to a baseline vision-based tracking method, we demonstrate that our multimodal approach significantly improves tracking accuracy for several finger joints prone to self-occlusion. These findings suggest that our system has the potential to enhance XR experiences by providing more accurate and robust hand tracking, even in the presence of self-occlusion.

To enable general-purpose robots, we will require the robot to operate daily articulated objects as humans do. Current robot manipulation has heavily relied on using a parallel gripper, which restricts the robot to a limited set of objects. On the other hand, operating with a multi-finger robot hand will allow better approximation to human behavior and enable the robot to operate on diverse articulated objects. To this end, we propose a new benchmark called DexArt, which involves Dexterous manipulation with Articulated objects in a physical simulator. In our benchmark, we define multiple complex manipulation tasks, and the robot hand will need to manipulate diverse articulated objects within each task. Our main focus is to evaluate the generalizability of the learned policy on unseen articulated objects. This is very challenging given the high degrees of freedom of both hands and objects. We use Reinforcement Learning with 3D representation learning to achieve generalization. Through extensive studies, we provide new insights into how 3D representation learning affects decision making in RL with 3D point cloud inputs. More details can be found at https://www.chenbao.tech/dexart/.

Generalized in-hand manipulation has long been an unsolved challenge of robotics. As a small step towards this grand goal, we demonstrate how to design and learn a simple adaptive controller to achieve in-hand object rotation using only fingertips. The controller is trained entirely in simulation on only cylindrical objects, which then - without any fine-tuning - can be directly deployed to a real robot hand to rotate dozens of objects with diverse sizes, shapes, and weights over the z-axis. This is achieved via rapid online adaptation of the controller to the object properties using only proprioception history. Furthermore, natural and stable finger gaits automatically emerge from training the control policy via reinforcement learning. Code and more videos are available at https://haozhi.io/hora

Tactile sensing provides contact information that can be difficult to infer from vision alone, but tactile hardware for dexterous hands has not converged to a common design. Dexterous hands differ in finger structure, contact surfaces, and sensor layouts, while simulated tactile signals still differ from measurements produced by physical sensors. These factors make it difficult to study visuo-tactile manipulation across diverse dexterous hands within a consistent experimental setting. We present Bench2Dex, a simulation benchmark for visuo-tactile bimanual manipulation across 12 dexterous hands. We adapt existing robot models with a shared simulated tactile interface that converts local contact geometry into image-like tactile observations. The interface provides a consistent observation format across different hand morphologies without attempting to reproduce the output of a specific physical tactile sensor. Bench2Dex includes 26 bimanual manipulation tasks that involve tool use, articulated-object interaction, and multi-stage manipulation, together with about 1.3K human-teleoperated demonstrations. The benchmark provides synchronized visual, tactile, proprioceptive, action, and object-state observations, together with executable task metrics. For robustness, we group seven perturbation types into invariance axis, where the correct action does not change, and equivariance axis, where the correct action changes together with the perturbation. We evaluate ACT, Diffusion Policy, pi0.5, and GR00T N1.5 on Bench2Dex and report their performance and failure modes. Bench2Dex is meant as a platform for studying visuo-tactile learning across dexterous hands. It does not assume that simulated tactile observations can replace real tactile sensing; it offers a shared setting for algorithm development while tactile hardware and simulation models are still evolving.

Recent advancements in speculative decoding have demonstrated considerable speedup across a wide array of large language model (LLM) tasks. Speculative decoding inherently relies on sacrificing extra memory allocations to generate several candidate tokens, of which acceptance rate drives the speedup. However, deploying speculative decoding on memory-constrained devices, such as mobile GPUs, remains as a significant challenge in real-world scenarios. In this work, we present a device-aware inference engine named SpecMemo that can smartly control memory allocations at finer levels to enable multi-turn chatbots with speculative decoding on such limited memory devices. Our methodology stems from theoretically modeling memory footprint of speculative decoding to determine a lower bound on the required memory budget while retaining speedup. SpecMemo empirically acquires a careful balance between minimizing redundant memory allocations for rejected candidate tokens and maintaining competitive performance gains from speculation. Notably, with SpecMemo's memory management, we maintain 96% of overall throughput from speculative decoding on MT-Bench, with reduced generation-memory by 65% on single Nvidia Titan RTX. Given multiple constrained GPUs, we build on top of previous speculative decoding architectures to facilitate big-model inference by distributing Llama-2-70B-Chat model, on which we provide novel batched speculative decoding to increase usability of multiple small server GPUs. This novel framework demonstrates 2x speedup over distributed and batched vanilla decoding with the base model on eight AMD MI250 GPUs. Moreover, inference throughput increases remarkably 8x with batch size 10. Our work contributes to democratized LLM applications in resource-constrained environments, providing a pathway for faster and cheaper deployment of real-world LLM applications with robust performance.

Gesture recognition on video is normally posed as classification: label each frame, then act on the label. That is adequate for control, where a command may be obeyed several frames late without a user noticing, and inadequate for synchronisation, where an output must be aligned to the frame on which the gesture physically occurred. We take the synchronisation problem for one common movement, the rotation of an open hand about its long axis, and show that it admits an exact solution needing no classifier, no training data and no calibration. Let s be the normalised two-dimensional cross product of the two palm edges at the wrist and the outer knuckles, under the projection the camera already performs. We prove that s factorises as k(theta)cos(theta) with |k| > 0 everywhere, so s vanishes exactly when the palm is edge-on and its sign tracks the face presented to the camera. Detection is therefore a zero crossing of one scalar, which yields an instant rather than an interval, and we prove the criterion invariant to image mirroring, hand scale and handedness, all from its algebraic form rather than from the landmark estimator. A two-handed interaction uses four fingertips as a window onto a restyled version of the same scene. We give a coverage predicate that stays correct when the hands cross, where the usual triangulation does not, and derive each free parameter of the three stylisation operators from a noise statistic rather than by inspection. Against a corpus with exact ground truth the criterion detects 95% of flips with no false positive in 240 near-miss sequences, and places each within 6.7 ms on average of the instant it occurred, a sixth of the interval at which the hand is observed, against 23.0 ms for reporting the bracketing sample. Reporting an event more finely than one samples follows from treating a gesture as the zero of a continuous quantity rather than a label.

We present a deep learning method for composite and task-driven motion control for physically simulated characters. In contrast to existing data-driven approaches using reinforcement learning that imitate full-body motions, we learn decoupled motions for specific body parts from multiple reference motions simultaneously and directly by leveraging the use of multiple discriminators in a GAN-like setup. In this process, there is no need of any manual work to produce composite reference motions for learning. Instead, the control policy explores by itself how the composite motions can be combined automatically. We further account for multiple task-specific rewards and train a single, multi-objective control policy. To this end, we propose a novel framework for multi-objective learning that adaptively balances the learning of disparate motions from multiple sources and multiple goal-directed control objectives. In addition, as composite motions are typically augmentations of simpler behaviors, we introduce a sample-efficient method for training composite control policies in an incremental manner, where we reuse a pre-trained policy as the meta policy and train a cooperative policy that adapts the meta one for new composite tasks. We show the applicability of our approach on a variety of challenging multi-objective tasks involving both composite motion imitation and multiple goal-directed control.

A walking robotic hand must use the same fingers to move its body, support its weight, and interact with the environment. We show how an anthropomorphic hand can learn these skills while retaining its finger design and position controller. Onboard power and computation make the platform self-contained. Our reinforcement learning approach accounts for the hand's unequal fingers, with training in a simulator calibrated from hardware measurements. In simulation, the hand moves faster with our reward formulation than with tuned rewards originally designed for quadrupeds. On hardware, task-specific policies enable untethered crawling, steering, and fall recovery. While supporting its own weight, the hand also executes successive keyboard commands without vision and pushes an object to targets using overhead visual feedback. These results demonstrate a compact mobile manipulator that reuses its fingers for locomotion and interaction, without a separate locomotion mechanism.

Synthesizing human motion has advanced rapidly, yet realistic hand motion and bimanual interaction remain underexplored. Whole-body models often miss the fine-grained cues that drive dexterous behavior, finger articulation, contact timing, and inter-hand coordination, and existing resources lack high-fidelity bimanual sequences that capture nuanced finger dynamics and collaboration. To fill this gap, we present HandX, a unified foundation spanning data, annotation, and evaluation. We consolidate and filter existing datasets for quality, and collect a new motion-capture dataset targeting underrepresented bimanual interactions with detailed finger dynamics. For scalable annotation, we introduce a decoupled strategy that extracts representative motion features, e.g., contact events and finger flexion, and then leverages reasoning from large language models to produce fine-grained, semantically rich descriptions aligned with these features. Building on the resulting data and annotations, we benchmark diffusion and autoregressive models with versatile conditioning modes. Experiments demonstrate high-quality dexterous motion generation, supported by our newly proposed hand-focused metrics. We further observe clear scaling trends: larger models trained on larger, higher-quality datasets produce more semantically coherent bimanual motion. Our dataset is released to support future research.

Touch sensing is beneficial for solving a wide variety of manipulation tasks. While there exists a wide range of tactile sensors with different properties, exploiting the fusion of multiple heterogeneous tactile sensors to improve manipulation learning remains underexplored. We present Multi-Resolution Tactile Sensing (MiTaS), a representation framework that leverages multiple tactile sensors operating at different temporal resolutions in order to solve complex contact-rich manipulation tasks. We propose a novel architecture using modality-specific convolutional stems and transformer-based fusion that effectively fuses information from an RGB camera stream, a vision-based GelSight Mini sensor and a high-frequency event-based Evetac sensor. This multi-sensor representation then conditions a flow-matching policy for solving downstream tasks. Experimental results across five contact-rich manipulation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-resolution tactile features in imitation learning. MiTaS achieves an average success rate of 80 %, while vision-only (31 %) and visual-tactile (54 %) baselines cannot solve the task reliably. Co-training a visuo-tactile model with multi-tactile data boosts performance by over 10 \% in certain tasks, without having access to the Evetac sensor during policy evaluation. A detailed sensor-reading and attention analysis reveals the importance of different sensors throughout task execution, validating our multi-resolution tactile sensing approach. Project Page: http://mitas-touch.github.io.

Whole-arm manipulation involves direct contact with the environment while the robot completes a task by distributing contact across multiple links as contacts form, slide, and break. This setting breaks common implicit assumptions in many learning-based manipulation pipelines: arm configuration tightly couples motion and contact forces, contact state is partially observed under occlusion, and purely learned rollouts can become physically inconsistent under distribution shift because many multi-link contact configurations are sparsely represented in the data. To address this, we propose TACTIC (Tactile and Vision Conditioned Contact-Centric Control), a receding-horizon controller for whole-arm manipulation. TACTIC uses a contact-centric hybrid predictive model that combines RGB-D, distributed tactile sensing, and a compact 2D proximity representation. The model couples a learned, action-conditioned latent dynamics model with analytical kinematics through contact Jacobians, enabling rollouts of future contact configurations and interaction forces. TACTIC integrates these rollouts into a sampling-based MPC planner with contact-aware action sampling: contact Jacobian-based projections steer sampled action sequences toward force-modulating directions, and objectives defined over predicted proximity and interaction forces trade task progress against whole-arm force regulation. We evaluate TACTIC in simulation against state-of-the-art model-based and model-free methods, and perform ablations that isolate the contribution of each design choice. TACTIC consistently outperforms other methods. We further demonstrate real-world performance on a robot with distributed tactile sensing across three whole-arm manipulation tasks that require multi-contact trajectories: turning over and repositioning a manikin, and goal-reaching in a 3D dynamic maze. Website: https://emprise.cs.cornell.edu/tactic

Robotic manipulation integrates vision, touch, and language, whose importance shifts across stages: vision guides reaching, while touch, through its evolution over time, decides grasping, alignment, and contact. Yet existing multi-modal manipulation policies typically use fixed temporal contexts and fusion strategies, despite shifts in what each modality contributes across different skills. We study how vision and touch should be combined at the level of primitive skills, asking what each skill needs from each sensor, and propose a skill-conditioned representation in which the queried skill conditions fusion over modality-specific short-term observation tokens while attending to a sparse event memory that retains terminal observations from the last K executed skills. Evaluated by skill progress estimation on three contact-rich tasks, it reduces slip-detection delay by 87% against fine-tuned SOTA progress models, twist-completion delay by 67.5% against a vision-only ablation, and progress error on a blind search task by 92% through sparse event memory. Gains concentrate exactly where completion is defined by contact or task history. More broadly, our results suggest that observation formation not only policy architecture is a central challenge in multi-modal representation. Project Website: http://what-to-attend-what-to-keep.github.io/

Whole-body teleoperation requires users to coordinate perception, manipulation, posture, and mobility across multiple robot components. This coordination is difficult because users must simultaneously control the robot's head, arms, torso, and base while maintaining task awareness and avoiding kinematic or environmental constraints. In this paper, we propose coupled egocentric control, a body-following teleoperation approach in which the robot's torso and base automatically respond to the operator's head and arm motions. Rather than requiring explicit touchpad commands for every torso or base adjustment, the system lets users focus on gaze and hand control: head pitch adjusts torso height, head yaw drives base rotation, end-effector height adjusts torso motion, and end-effector workspace boundaries trigger base translation. We evaluate this approach in a user study on whole-body teleoperation of a TIAGo mobile manipulator for home-care-inspired tasks. Compared with a baseline hybrid interface, coupled egocentric control improves object manipulation efficiency, reduces button-based control effort and arm singularities, lowers mental demand and overall workload, and increases ease of use, ease of learning, confidence, and user preference for torso and base control.

Brachiation is the primary form of locomotion for gibbons and siamangs, in which these primates swing from tree limb to tree limb using only their arms. It is challenging to control because of the limited control authority, the required advance planning, and the precision of the required grasps. We present a novel approach to this problem using reinforcement learning, and as demonstrated on a finger-less 14-link planar model that learns to brachiate across challenging handhold sequences. Key to our method is the use of a simplified model, a point mass with a virtual arm, for which we first learn a policy that can brachiate across handhold sequences with a prescribed order. This facilitates the learning of the policy for the full model, for which it provides guidance by providing an overall center-of-mass trajectory to imitate, as well as for the timing of the holds. Lastly, the simplified model can also readily be used for planning suitable sequences of handholds in a given environment. Our results demonstrate brachiation motions with a variety of durations for the flight and hold phases, as well as emergent extra back-and-forth swings when this proves useful. The system is evaluated with a variety of ablations. The method enables future work towards more general 3D brachiation, as well as using simplified model imitation in other settings.

Multi-fingered robots promise the speed and dexterity of human hands, yet challenging problems such as precise assembly have remained out of reach. These tasks are contact-rich, making data collection for imitation learning difficult, and sparse-reward, making direct exploration with reinforcement learning (RL) intractable. Consequently, prior work has made progress by structuring the problem with specialized grippers, tool attachments, and environment fixtures. In this work, we argue that before a robot can perfect precise assembly, it must first learn to play. We further ask the question: what factors in the process of learning to play matter for precise assembly? We propose Play2Perfect, an RL framework for task-agnostic pretraining through play on diverse objects and goals, which is then perfected on precise assembly. The goal of play is to acquire reusable manipulation priors, such as grasping, in-hand reorientation and pose reaching. Finetuning then adapts this general prior to assembly, focusing exploration on the final contact-rich, high-precision interactions needed for success. We systematically study key design choices in play pretraining, including object diversity, training objective, trajectory diversity, and goal precision. We show that our prior is 33x more sample-efficient than RL training from scratch, even when provided with dense, multi-stage rewards. We demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, achieving 60% success on tight insertions with only 0.5 mm contact clearance, and over 50% success on long-horizon multi-part assembly and screwing.

Vision-language-action policies may predict a transferable manipulation strategy yet fail to realize it reliably on the encountered object: objects compatible with the same grasp differ in geometry and compliance, and visual feedback degrades under closure occlusion. AgenticTactileVLA is presented as an execution-time supervisor that shifts part of object-specific adaptation from prediction to physical interaction. A fixed VLA provides the approach and hand targets; the supervisor decides whether to remain transparent, refine finger flexion, retain or release the corrected configuration, return control to the VLA for retry, or select a compliant hand-control regime. It uses finger-position and motor-effort feedback as proprioceptive contact evidence and requires neither tactile sensors nor VLA retraining. On a Unitree G1 with a BrainCo Revo2 hand, a randomized matched-block evaluation on five objects held out from VLA training yields 61.3% completion for the base VLA, 72.0% for unconditional close-to-stall control, and 84.0% for the supervisor under a shared budget; the gain is positive on every object and persists under moderate pose perturbations. Ablations show the gain is not explained by extended closure alone, and that selective triggering reduces correction episodes by 65.7% with no detected change in completion. A retention audit shows acceptance predicts retention in 88.9% of held-out cases, while compliant objects expose conservative false rejection. A thin-walled-cup study demonstrates contextual routing to compliant control, matching an always-compliant reference. These results suggest that contact-guided execution-time adaptation can improve the object-level generalization of a fixed VLA to held-out objects by adapting physical realization without object-specific retraining.

We present ArtiGrasp, a novel method to synthesize bi-manual hand-object interactions that include grasping and articulation. This task is challenging due to the diversity of the global wrist motions and the precise finger control that are necessary to articulate objects. ArtiGrasp leverages reinforcement learning and physics simulations to train a policy that controls the global and local hand pose. Our framework unifies grasping and articulation within a single policy guided by a single hand pose reference. Moreover, to facilitate the training of the precise finger control required for articulation, we present a learning curriculum with increasing difficulty. It starts with single-hand manipulation of stationary objects and continues with multi-agent training including both hands and non-stationary objects. To evaluate our method, we introduce Dynamic Object Grasping and Articulation, a task that involves bringing an object into a target articulated pose. This task requires grasping, relocation, and articulation. We show our method's efficacy towards this task. We further demonstrate that our method can generate motions with noisy hand-object pose estimates from an off-the-shelf image-based regressor.

Dexterous manipulation poses a challenging high-dimensional optimization problem, as useful behaviors require coordinated motion across many hand joints. In reinforcement learning (RL) and sampling-based trajectory optimization, exploration commonly relies on independent robot joint perturbations, making coordinated behaviors difficult to discover. Prior work reduces this search space for grasp learning using low-dimensional spaces of coordinated joint motions learned from human hand data, but this restricts the expressivity required for general manipulation. Some combine learned and joint-space actions to restore expressivity, but this increases dimensionality and introduces redundancy. We study these effects across diverse manipulation settings, varying action dimensionality, exploration strategy, and the source of human data. Our experiments suggest that human-motion priors are most effective when used to structure exploration rather than change the action representation. Motivated by this finding, we propose EigenDEXplore, which induces correlated exploration by adding perturbations along human-derived eigenvectors to independent joint-space noise, leaving the action space unchanged. Across multiple dexterous hands, EigenDEXplore consistently outperforms joint-space and learned action-space baselines in grasping, in-hand reorientation, and contact-rich manipulation. These gains span unstructured and reference-guided RL, trajectory optimization, and sim-to-real deployment, and are largest in settings with less reward shaping and curriculum design.

Increased effort during use of the paretic arm and hand can provoke involuntary abnormal synergy patterns and amplify stiffness effects of muscle tone for individuals after stroke, which can add difficulty for user-controlled devices to assist hand movement during functional tasks. We study how volitional effort, exerted in an attempt to open or close the hand, affects resistance to robot-assisted movement at the finger level. We perform experiments with three chronic stroke survivors to measure changes in stiffness when the user is actively exerting effort to activate ipsilateral EMG-controlled robot-assisted hand movements, compared with when the fingers are passively stretched, as well as overall effects from sustained active engagement and use. Our results suggest that active engagement of the upper extremity increases muscle tone in the finger to a much greater degree than through passive-stretch or sustained exertion over time. Potential design implications of this work suggest that developers should anticipate higher levels of finger stiffness when relying on user-driven ipsilateral control methods for assistive or rehabilitative devices for stroke.

Dexterous manipulation requires tactile feedback. However, robot tactile demonstrations are difficult to scale,because dexterous-hand teleoperation provides limited tactile feedback to the operator. In contrast, human demonstrations offer a substantially more scalable source of diverse tactile interactions. Motivated by a simple premise: hands can change, but the underlying physics of interaction does not. We leverage human tactile data to improve dexterous manipulation policies. Specifically, we first build a tactile motion-capture system that synchronously records images, tactile signals, and hand motions. Using this system, we construct the UVTA dataset spanning five contact-rich tasks, with 1,000 human demonstrations covering diverse interaction patterns and 150 robot demonstrations per task. To transfer the underlying physics of human interaction to robot control, we propose a Unified Visual-Tactile-Action Model that maps both embodiments into aligned tactile and action representations and jointly predicts future action and tactile trajectories. The joint objective enables human demonstrations to supervise contact-aware representation learning, while only robot actions are executed during deployment. In real-robot evaluations across five tasks, our method achieves an average success rate of 70%, outperforming the strongest visual-tactile baseline, which achieves 29%, and an architecture ablation, which achieves 42%. Performance improves consistently with additional human demonstrations and exhibits no saturation at 1,000 demonstrations per task, validating the effectiveness of scalable human tactile data for dexterous manipulation. Project page is available at https://uni-vta.github.io/.

Dexterous robot hands can receive useful motion intent from teleoperation or learned policies, but successful execution also depends on contact decisions that these commands rarely specify. We introduce DexFLEX, a contact-aware foundation controller that turns upstream fingertip-motion drafts into contact-consistent joint commands. Instead of treating a draft as a trajectory to copy, DexFLEX treats it as evidence about intent: from the current tactile-proprioceptive state, it proposes feasible short-horizon motion chunks, predicts their contact consequences, and selects the candidate that best follows the command while preserving future contact stability. At inference time, a simple Draft-Dream-Select procedure combines pure-prior proposals for recovery with draft-seeded proposals for responsiveness, then decodes the selected motion into executable joint-space targets. Across degraded-command simulation, real-world shared control, and visuomotor policy learning, the same trained controller improves robustness without retraining, increasing real-world teleoperation success from 29.2% to 78.3% and reaching 46.7% policy-learning success, 3.5 times direct joint-action prediction, and 1.56 times prior-only correction. Videos are available at dex-flex.github.io.

Dexterous manipulation is limited by both control and design, without consensus as to what makes manipulators best for performing dexterous tasks. This raises a fundamental challenge: how should we design and control robot manipulators that are optimized for dexterity? We present a co-design framework that learns task-specific hand morphology and complementary dexterous control policies. The framework supports 1) an expansive morphology search space including joint, finger, and palm generation, 2) scalable evaluation across the wide design space via morphology-conditioned cross-embodied control, and 3) real-world fabrication with accessible components. We evaluate the approach across multiple dexterous tasks, including in-hand rotation with simulation and real deployment. Our framework enables an end-to-end pipeline that can design, train, fabricate, and deploy a new robotic hand in under 24 hours. The full framework and generated robot hands are open-sourced and available on our website.

Humanoid whole-body control requires adapting to diverse tasks such as navigation, loco-manipulation, and tabletop manipulation, each demanding a different mode of control. For example, navigation relies on root velocity tracking, while tabletop manipulation prioritizes upper-body joint angle tracking. Existing approaches typically train individual policies tailored to a specific command space, limiting their transferability across modes. We present the key insight that full-body kinematic motion imitation can serve as a common abstraction for all these tasks and provide general-purpose motor skills for learning multiple modes of whole-body control. Building on this, we propose HOVER (Humanoid Versatile Controller), a multi-mode policy distillation framework that consolidates diverse control modes into a unified policy. HOVER enables seamless transitions between control modes while preserving the distinct advantages of each, offering a robust and scalable solution for humanoid control across a wide range of modes. By eliminating the need for policy retraining for each control mode, our approach improves efficiency and flexibility for future humanoid applications.

Manipulating objects with two multi-fingered hands has been a long-standing challenge in robotics, attributed to the contact-rich nature of many manipulation tasks and the complexity inherent in coordinating a high-dimensional bimanual system. In this work, we consider the problem of twisting lids of various bottle-like objects with two hands, and demonstrate that policies trained in simulation using deep reinforcement learning can be effectively transferred to the real world. With novel engineering insights into physical modeling, real-time perception, and reward design, the policy demonstrates generalization capabilities across a diverse set of unseen objects, showcasing dynamic and dexterous behaviors. Our findings serve as compelling evidence that deep reinforcement learning combined with sim-to-real transfer remains a promising approach for addressing manipulation problems of unprecedented complexity.

Collecting demonstrations enriched with fine-grained tactile information is critical for dexterous manipulation, particularly in contact-rich tasks that require precise force control and physical interaction. While prior works primarily focus on teleoperation or video-based retargeting, they often suffer from kinematic mismatches and the absence of real-time tactile feedback, hindering the acquisition of high-fidelity tactile data. To mitigate this issue, we propose KineDex, a hand-over-hand kinesthetic teaching paradigm in which the operator's motion is directly transferred to the dexterous hand, enabling the collection of physically grounded demonstrations enriched with accurate tactile feedback. To resolve occlusions from human hand, we apply inpainting technique to preprocess the visual observations. Based on these demonstrations, we then train a visuomotor policy using tactile-augmented inputs and implement force control during deployment for precise contact-rich manipulation. We evaluate KineDex on a suite of challenging contact-rich manipulation tasks, including particularly difficult scenarios such as squeezing toothpaste onto a toothbrush, which require precise multi-finger coordination and stable force regulation. Across these tasks, KineDex achieves an average success rate of 74.4%, representing a 57.7% improvement over the variant without force control. Comparative experiments with teleoperation and user studies further validate the advantages of KineDex in data collection efficiency and operability. Specifically, KineDex collects data over twice as fast as teleoperation across two tasks of varying difficulty, while maintaining a near-100% success rate, compared to under 50% for teleoperation.

We introduce RotateIt, a system that enables fingertip-based object rotation along multiple axes by leveraging multimodal sensory inputs. Our system is trained in simulation, where it has access to ground-truth object shapes and physical properties. Then we distill it to operate on realistic yet noisy simulated visuotactile and proprioceptive sensory inputs. These multimodal inputs are fused via a visuotactile transformer, enabling online inference of object shapes and physical properties during deployment. We show significant performance improvements over prior methods and the importance of visual and tactile sensing.

Achieving human-like dexterous manipulation remains a major challenge for general-purpose robots. While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show potential in learning skills from demonstrations, their scalability is limited by scarce high-quality training data. Existing data collection methods face inherent constraints: manual teleoperation overloads human operators, while automated planning often produces unnatural motions. We propose a Shared Autonomy framework that divides control between macro and micro motions. A human operator guides the robot's arm pose through intuitive VR teleoperation, while an autonomous DexGrasp-VLA policy handles fine-grained hand control using real-time tactile and visual feedback. This division significantly reduces cognitive load and enables efficient collection of high-quality coordinated arm-hand demonstrations. Using this data, we train an end-to-end VLA policy enhanced with our novel Arm-Hand Feature Enhancement module, which captures both distinct and shared representations of macro and micro movements for more natural coordination. Our Corrective Teleoperation system enables continuous policy improvement through human-in-the-loop failure recovery. Experiments demonstrate that our framework generates high-quality data with minimal manpower and achieves a 90% success rate across diverse objects, including unseen instances. Comprehensive evaluations validate the system's effectiveness in developing dexterous manipulation capabilities.

Neural Network movement controllers promise a variety of advantages over conventional control methods however they are not widely adopted due to their inability to produce reliably precise movements. This research explores a bilateral neural network architecture as a control system for motor tasks. We aimed to achieve hemispheric specialisation similar to what is observed in humans across different tasks; the dominant system (usually the right hand, left hemisphere) excels at tasks involving coordination and efficiency of movement, and the non-dominant system performs better at tasks requiring positional stability. Specialisation was achieved by training the hemispheres with different loss functions tailored toward the expected behaviour of the respective hemispheres. We compared bilateral models with and without specialised hemispheres, with and without inter-hemispheric connectivity (representing the biological Corpus Callosum), and unilateral models with and without specialisation. The models were trained and tested on two tasks common in the human motor control literature: the random reach task, suited to the dominant system, a model with better coordination, and the hold position task, suited to the non-dominant system, a model with more stable movement. Each system out-performed the non-favoured system in its preferred task. For both tasks, a bilateral model outperforms the 'non-preferred' hand, and is as good or better than the 'preferred' hand. The Corpus Callosum tends to improve performance, but not always for the specialised models.

We propose a novel approach to multi-fingered grasp planning leveraging learned deep neural network models. We train a convolutional neural network to predict grasp success as a function of both visual information of an object and grasp configuration. We can then formulate grasp planning as inferring the grasp configuration which maximizes the probability of grasp success. We efficiently perform this inference using a gradient-ascent optimization inside the neural network using the backpropagation algorithm. Our work is the first to directly plan high quality multifingered grasps in configuration space using a deep neural network without the need of an external planner. We validate our inference method performing both multifinger and two-finger grasps on real robots. Our experimental results show that our planning method outperforms existing planning methods for neural networks; while offering several other benefits including being data-efficient in learning and fast enough to be deployed in real robotic applications.

We study the problem of functional retargeting: learning dexterous manipulation policies to track object states from human hand-object demonstrations. We focus on long-horizon, bimanual tasks with articulated objects, which is challenging due to large action space, spatiotemporal discontinuities, and embodiment gap between human and robot hands. We propose DexMachina, a novel curriculum-based algorithm: the key idea is to use virtual object controllers with decaying strength: an object is first driven automatically towards its target states, such that the policy can gradually learn to take over under motion and contact guidance. We release a simulation benchmark with a diverse set of tasks and dexterous hands, and show that DexMachina significantly outperforms baseline methods. Our algorithm and benchmark enable a functional comparison for hardware designs, and we present key findings informed by quantitative and qualitative results. With the recent surge in dexterous hand development, we hope this work will provide a useful platform for identifying desirable hardware capabilities and lower the barrier for contributing to future research. Videos and more at https://project-dexmachina.github.io/

Robotic grasping of thin, flat objects such as coins on hard surfaces remains challenging because conventional methods require reorienting the object, accessing its underside, or adding a dedicated nail mechanism. We previously showed that a rigid nail arrests soft-pad deformation and thereby forms a geometric constraint that improves precision grasping. Here we asked whether an additional constraint-forming boundary, created within the pad by material choice rather than by anatomy, could extend the conditions under which that constraint holds. We fabricated anthropomimetic fingertips with Shore E10 silicone at the center and Shore A60 at the sides, and compared them with uniformly soft E10 fingertips. An automated apparatus performed an oblique rotational tip pinch in which the pad engaged the coin's lateral surface, lifting it from flush contact with no gap beneath it. Over variations in horizontal approach distances, vertical finger displacements, and index-finger rotation, the mixed-stiffness pair maintained high success rates across more tested settings than the uniform pair during both geometric-constraint formation and the transition to a stable grasp. The nail-free pair failed in all 36 conditions of Experiment 1-1. However, the uniform pair performed better when coin position along the finger axis was varied, a condition-dependent trade-off. After tuning for coin size, both fingertip types grasped all six Japanese denominations. These results suggest that the operating range for thin-object grasping depends not only on pad softness but also on where stiffness is placed within a nail-supported pad, making boundary placement a candidate fingertip design variable.

Dexterous manipulation remains one of the most challenging problems in robotics, requiring coherent control of high-DoF hands and arms under complex, contact-rich dynamics. A major barrier is embodiment variability: different dexterous hands exhibit distinct kinematics and dynamics, forcing prior methods to train separate policies or rely on shared action spaces with per-embodiment decoder heads. We present DexFormer, an end-to-end, dynamics-aware cross-embodiment policy built on a modified transformer backbone that conditions on historical observations. By using temporal context to infer morphology and dynamics on the fly, DexFormer adapts to diverse hand configurations and produces embodiment-appropriate control actions. Trained over a variety of procedurally generated dexterous-hand assets, DexFormer acquires a generalizable manipulation prior and exhibits strong zero-shot transfer to Leap Hand, Allegro Hand, and Rapid Hand. Our results show that a single policy can generalize across heterogeneous hand embodiments, establishing a scalable foundation for cross-embodiment dexterous manipulation. Project website: https://davidlxu.github.io/DexFormer-web/.

Dual-hand action segmentation, densely predicting actions for both hands from untrimmed videos, is essential for understanding complex bimanual activities. However, it poses several unique challenges: complex inter-hand dependencies, visual asymmetry between hands, representation conflicts where the dominant hand monopolizes gradients, and semantic ambiguity in fine-grained actions. We propose Polyphony, a three-stage method to address these challenges through: (1) an Alternating Dual-Hand Vision Transformer that alternates training between left- and right-hand mini-batches to ensure balanced gradient contributions from both hands while sharing a spatio-temporal encoder; (2) Semantic Feature Conditioning that aligns visual features with structured, compositional action descriptions to enhance discrimination of semantically similar actions; and (3) Diffusion-Based Segmentation with cross-hand feature fusion for inter-hand coordination and adaptive loss weighting for balancing performance. Polyphony achieves state-of-the-art on both dual-hand datasets (HA-ViD, ATTACH) with improvements up to 16.8 points, and on the single-stream Breakfast dataset (82.5%), outperforming the prior best method that uses a 12x larger backbone. Notably, our unified model with a single shared backbone surpasses baselines requiring separate per-hand models. Code is at https://github.com/x-labs-xyz/Polyphony-Dual-hand-Action-Segmentation.

Grasping is a fundamental capability for robots to interact with the physical world. Humans, equipped with two hands, autonomously select appropriate grasp strategies based on the shape, size, and weight of objects, enabling robust grasping and subsequent manipulation. In contrast, current robotic grasping remains limited, particularly in multi-strategy settings. Although substantial efforts have targeted parallel-gripper and single-hand grasping, dexterous grasping for bimanual robots remains underexplored, with data being a primary bottleneck. Achieving physically plausible and geometrically conforming grasps that can withstand external wrenches poses significant challenges. To address these issues, we introduce UltraDexGrasp, a framework for universal dexterous grasping with bimanual robots. The proposed data-generation pipeline integrates optimization-based grasp synthesis with planning-based demonstration generation, yielding high-quality and diverse trajectories across multiple grasp strategies. With this framework, we curate UltraDexGrasp-20M, a large-scale, multi-strategy grasp dataset comprising 20 million frames across 1,000 objects. Based on UltraDexGrasp-20M, we further develop a simple yet effective grasp policy that takes point clouds as input, aggregates scene features via unidirectional attention, and predicts control commands. Trained exclusively on synthetic data, the policy achieves robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and consistently succeeds on novel objects with varied shapes, sizes, and weights, attaining an average success rate of 81.2% in real-world universal dexterous grasping. To facilitate future research on grasping with bimanual robots, we open-source the data generation pipeline at https://github.com/InternRobotics/UltraDexGrasp.

Human hands possess the dexterity to interact with diverse objects such as grasping specific parts of the objects and/or approaching them from desired directions. More importantly, humans can grasp objects of any shape without object-specific skills. Recent works synthesize grasping motions following single objectives such as a desired approach heading direction or a grasping area. Moreover, they usually rely on expensive 3D hand-object data during training and inference, which limits their capability to synthesize grasping motions for unseen objects at scale. In this paper, we unify the generation of hand-object grasping motions across multiple motion objectives, diverse object shapes and dexterous hand morphologies in a policy learning framework GraspXL. The objectives are composed of the graspable area, heading direction during approach, wrist rotation, and hand position. Without requiring any 3D hand-object interaction data, our policy trained with 58 objects can robustly synthesize diverse grasping motions for more than 500k unseen objects with a success rate of 82.2%. At the same time, the policy adheres to objectives, which enables the generation of diverse grasps per object. Moreover, we show that our framework can be deployed to different dexterous hands and work with reconstructed or generated objects. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate our method to show the efficacy of our approach. Our model, code, and the large-scale generated motions are available at https://eth-ait.github.io/graspxl/.

Learning dexterous manipulation requires demonstrations that preserve fine hand-object interactions while remaining executable at deployment. Existing pipelines either lose deployable dexterity through retargeting or embodiment conversion, or rely on robot-specific teleoperation that is costly to scale and often lacks intuitive, contact-aware control for dexterous data collection. We present RealDexUMI, a wearable universal manipulation interface built around a shared dexterous end-effector module that integrates a lightweight dexterous hand, in-hand vision, and fingertip tactile sensing. A palm-side isomorphic teleoperation glove maps human finger inputs to robot-hand joint commands, enabling real-time, retargeting-free, intuitive, and precise hand control. The shared hand and sensing modules yield zero-gap end-effector data, with matched in-hand observations, tactile signals, contacts, and hand actions between collection and deployment. Across eight real-robot tasks spanning fine-grained, contact-rich, long-horizon, and bimanual manipulation, policies trained on RealDexUMI data achieve an average success rate of 88.75%, generalize to unseen initial poses, and transfer across three embodiments. Website: https://research.beingbeyond.com/realdexumi

Many everyday tasks require controlling contact force as well as motion. On a humanoid, this force must often be coordinated across both hands and the whole body, and cannot be specified by kinematic trajectories alone. Therefore, we present FLORE, a framework for learning force-reactive humanoid loco-manipulation. We collect robot-free demonstrations using two force-sensing UMI-style handheld grippers for hand motion and contact wrenches, and wearable trackers for body motion. A force-reactive diffusion policy takes vision, proprioception, and measured wrenches as input, then predicts actions and per-hand force commands. A hybrid compliance whole-body controller with force tracking executes these commands while maintaining balance: an integral of the force error measured by real force/torque (F/T) sensors lets each hand track force accurately along the commanded direction and remain compliant along the others. In simulation, the controller tracks per-hand force commands of varied magnitude and direction, with little loss in whole-body motion accuracy. Across three contact-rich tasks on the robot, the force-reactive policy succeeds in 80% of rollouts, compared with 26.7% for a position-only policy trained on the same demonstrations and executed by the same controller. For more details, please visit our website: https://louis-leee.github.io/FLoRe/.

Tactile sensing is critical to fine-grained, contact-rich manipulation tasks, such as insertion and assembly. Prior research has shown the possibility of learning tactile-guided policy from teleoperated demonstration data. However, to provide the demonstration, human users often rely on visual feedback to control the robot. This creates a gap between the sensing modality used for controlling the robot (visual) and the modality of interest (tactile). To bridge this gap, we introduce "MimicTouch", a novel framework for learning policies directly from demonstrations provided by human users with their hands. The key innovations are i) a human tactile data collection system which collects multi-modal tactile dataset for learning human's tactile-guided control strategy, ii) an imitation learning-based framework for learning human's tactile-guided control strategy through such data, and iii) an online residual RL framework to bridge the embodiment gap between the human hand and the robot gripper. Through comprehensive experiments, we highlight the efficacy of utilizing human's tactile-guided control strategy to resolve contact-rich manipulation tasks. The project website is at https://sites.google.com/view/MimicTouch.

We present an advance in wearable technology: a mobile-optimized, real-time, ultra-low-power event camera system that enables natural hand gesture control for smart glasses, dramatically improving user experience. While hand gesture recognition in computer vision has advanced significantly, critical challenges remain in creating systems that are intuitive, adaptable across diverse users and environments, and energy-efficient enough for practical wearable applications. Our approach tackles these challenges through carefully selected microgestures: lateral thumb swipes across the index finger (in both directions) and a double pinch between thumb and index fingertips. These human-centered interactions leverage natural hand movements, ensuring intuitive usability without requiring users to learn complex command sequences. To overcome variability in users and environments, we developed a novel simulation methodology that enables comprehensive domain sampling without extensive real-world data collection. Our power-optimised architecture maintains exceptional performance, achieving F1 scores above 80\% on benchmark datasets featuring diverse users and environments. The resulting models operate at just 6-8 mW when exploiting the Qualcomm Snapdragon Hexagon DSP, with our 2-channel implementation exceeding 70\% F1 accuracy and our 6-channel model surpassing 80\% F1 accuracy across all gesture classes in user studies. These results were achieved using only synthetic training data. This improves on the state-of-the-art for F1 accuracy by 20\% with a power reduction 25x when using DSP. This advancement brings deploying ultra-low-power vision systems in wearable devices closer and opens new possibilities for seamless human-computer interaction.

Teleoperation is a key approach for collecting high-quality, physically consistent demonstrations for robotic manipulation. However, teleoperation for dexterous manipulation remains constrained by: (i) inaccurate hand-robot motion mapping, which limits teleoperated dexterity, and (ii) limited tactile feedback that forces vision-dominated interaction and hinders perception of contact geometry and force variation. To address these challenges, we present TAG, a low-cost glove system that integrates precise hand motion capture with high-resolution tactile feedback, enabling effective tactile-in-the-loop dexterous teleoperation. For motion capture, TAG employs a non-contact magnetic sensing design that provides drift-free, electromagnetically robust 21-DoF joint tracking with joint angle estimation errors below 1 degree. Meanwhile, to restore tactile sensation, TAG equips each finger with a 32-actuator tactile array within a compact 2 cm^2 module, allowing operators to directly feel physical interactions at the robot end-effector through spatial activation patterns. Through real-world teleoperation experiments and user studies, we show that TAG enables reliable real-time perception of contact geometry and dynamic force, improves success rates in contact-rich teleoperation tasks, and increases the reliability of demonstration data collection for learning-based manipulation.

We introduce Yielding Universal Bidigital Interface (YUBI), a finger-aligned gripper designed to enable intuitive, ergonomic, and scalable data collection for bimanual dexterous manipulation. While handheld data collection systems such as Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) enable affordable data collection, their bulky pistol-grip designs can pose ergonomic and usability challenges for fine-grained, dexterous manipulation tasks. To address this, YUBI presents a distinct design principle: yielding, finger-driven actuation that directly maps human finger movements to gripper jaw motion. Using the YUBI devices, we set up a data collection system with integrated VR-based 6 DoF tracking of the gripper, ensuring high-fidelity trajectory data acquisition. We curate a UMI-based dataset of unprecedented scale: 8,434 hours across 1.20M episodes and 119 tasks. Experiments show that YUBI offers advantages over the UMI gripper in versatility for complex bimanual tasks, dexterity, and operational efficiency. A single policy trained on the YUBI dataset transfers across multiple bimanual robots (UR, Franka, and ELEY) simply by mounting the gripper on each platform, confirming that the collected data are directly executable as policy supervision. We release the gripper hardware, data-collection software, and dataset as one integrated stack, offering the open community a reproducible path to large-scale data acquisition for advancing robotic foundation models.

Dexterous manipulation is a critical aspect of human capability, enabling interaction with a wide variety of objects. Recent advancements in learning from human demonstrations and teleoperation have enabled progress for robots in such ability. However, these approaches either require complex data collection such as costly human effort for eye-robot contact, or suffer from poor generalization when faced with novel scenarios. To solve both challenges, we propose a framework, DexH2R, that combines human hand motion retargeting with a task-oriented residual action policy, improving task performance by bridging the embodiment gap between human and robotic dexterous hands. Specifically, DexH2R learns the residual policy directly from retargeted primitive actions and task-oriented rewards, eliminating the need for labor-intensive teleoperation systems. Moreover, we incorporate test-time guidance for novel scenarios by taking in desired trajectories of human hands and objects, allowing the dexterous hand to acquire new skills with high generalizability. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate the effectiveness of our work, outperforming prior state-of-the-arts by 40% across various settings.

Multi-finger robotic hand manipulation and grasping are challenging due to the high-dimensional action space and the difficulty of acquiring large-scale training data. Existing approaches largely rely on human teleoperation with wearable devices or specialized sensing equipment to capture hand-object interactions, which limits scalability. In this work, we propose VIDEOMANIP, a device-free framework that learns dexterous manipulation directly from RGB human videos. Leveraging recent advances in computer vision, VIDEOMANIP reconstructs explicit 3D robot-object trajectories from monocular videos by estimating human hand poses, object meshes, and retargets the reconstructed human motions to robotic hands for manipulation learning. To make the reconstructed robot data suitable for dexterous manipulation training, we introduce hand-object contact optimization with interaction-centric grasp modeling, as well as a demonstration synthesis strategy that generates diverse training trajectories from a single video, enabling generalizable policy learning without additional robot demonstrations. In simulation, the learned grasping model achieves a 70.25% success rate across 20 diverse objects using the Inspire Hand. In the real world, manipulation policies trained from RGB videos achieve an average 62.86% success rate across seven tasks using the LEAP Hand, outperforming retargeting-based methods by 15.87%. Project videos are available at videomanip.github.io.

Physical interaction quality is central to deformable-object manipulation, yet most benchmarks evaluate task success alone. A policy may complete the task while allowing slip or causing excessive compression. A primary bottleneck is the absence of visuo-tactile datasets that pair policy-visible contact observations with independent physical ground truth over complete tasks. We introduce SoftVTBench, a visuo-tactile dataset for physical-interaction-aware deformable-object manipulation. It contains 4,000 expert demonstrations and more than 50 assets, including volumetric deformable objects and visually matched rigid twins. At 20 Hz, each episode synchronizes multi-view RGB, dual-finger tactile RGB and marker motion, proprioception, language, and binary and continuous gripper actions, alongside evaluator-only finite-element (FEM) states. Building upon this dataset, we establish a closed-loop benchmark that uses fixed object-specific calibration to define the Deformation-aware Success Rate (DSR), which counts a rollout as successful only when it completes the task and keeps peak normalized deformation within tolerance. Across Diffusion Policy, π_{0.5}, and FastWAM, all 12 in-distribution configurations contain successful rollouts that violate the deformation tolerance, accounting for 0.7--24% of each configuration's successes. Under distribution shift, visuo-tactile variants achieve higher task success in all six policy--suite comparisons and higher DSR in five, whereas their in-distribution benefits are mixed. These results show that making touch available does not by itself ensure effective multimodal fusion. SoftVTBench therefore provides a common visuo-tactile resource for studying not only whether a policy succeeds, but how it physically interacts with deformable objects and when touch improves that interaction.

We present the PLATO Hand, a dexterous robotic hand with a hybrid fingertip that combines a rigid fingernail, embedded distal phalanx, and compliant pulp to shape contact behavior during manipulation. By mechanically organizing how contact is initiated, supported, and transmitted at the fingertip, this structure creates stable and task-relevant contact conditions across diverse object geometries and grasp orientations. We develop a strain-energy-based bending--indentation model to guide the fingertip design and to explain how material stiffness and contact geometry govern deformation partitioning within the fingertip. Experiments show improved pinch stability, improved fingernail-mediated dorsal-contact force transmission and proprioceptive observability, and successful execution of edge-sensitive manipulation tasks, including paper singulation, card picking, and orange peeling. These results show that coupling a mechanically structured contact interface with a force-motion-transparent finger mechanism provides a principled approach to precise manipulation. Our project page is at: https://platohand.github.io

We consider the problem of learning a common representation for dexterous manipulation across manipulators of different morphologies. To this end, we propose PCHands, a novel approach for extracting hand postural synergies from a large set of manipulators. We define a simplified and unified description format based on anchor positions for manipulators ranging from 2-finger grippers to 5-finger anthropomorphic hands. This enables learning a variable-length latent representation of the manipulator configuration and the alignment of the end-effector frame of all manipulators. We show that it is possible to extract principal components from this latent representation that is universal across manipulators of different structures and degrees of freedom. To evaluate PCHands, we use this compact representation to encode observation and action spaces of control policies for dexterous manipulation tasks learned with RL. In terms of learning efficiency and consistency, the proposed representation outperforms a baseline that learns the same tasks in joint space. We additionally show that PCHands performs robustly in RL from demonstration, when demonstrations are provided from a different manipulator. We further support our results with real-world experiments that involve a 2-finger gripper and a 4-finger anthropomorphic hand. Code and additional material are available at https://hsp-iit.github.io/PCHands/.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently become a central direction in embodied AI, but current systems are restricted to either dual-gripper control or single-arm dexterous hand manipulation. While low-dimensional gripper control can often be handled with simpler methods, high-dimensional dexterous hand control benefits greatly from full end-to-end VLA learning. In this work, we introduce Dexora, the first open-source VLA system that natively targets dual-arm, dual-hand high-DoF manipulation. We design a hybrid teleoperation pipeline that decouples gross arm kinematics (captured with a custom exoskeleton backpack) from fine finger motion (markerless hand tracking via Apple Vision Pro), and that drives both a physical dual-arm dual-hand platform and an identical MuJoCo digital twin. Using that interface, we assemble a large training corpus: an embodiment-matched synthetic corpus (100K simulated trajectories, 6.5M frames) and a real-world dataset of 10K teleoperated episodes (2.92M frames). To mitigate noisy teleoperation demonstrations, we propose a data-quality-aware training recipe: an offline discriminator provides clip-level weights for diffusion-transformer policy training, down-weighting low-quality demonstrations. Empirically, Dexora outperforms competitive VLA baselines on both basic and dexterous benchmarks (e.g., average dexterous success 66.7% vs. 51.7%), attains 90% success on basic tasks, and shows robust out-of-distribution and cross-embodiment generalization. Ablations confirm the importance of real data and the discriminator for dexterity.

Robots are becoming more capable and can autonomously perform tasks such as navigating between locations. However, human oversight remains crucial. This study compared two touchless methods for directing mobile robots: voice control and gesture control, to investigate the efficiency of the methods and the preference of users. We tested these methods in two conditions: one in which participants remained stationary and one in which they walked freely alongside the robot. We hypothesized that walking alongside the robot would result in higher intuitiveness ratings and improved task performance, based on the idea that walking promotes spatial alignment and reduces the effort required for mental rotation. In a 2x2 within-subject design, 218 participants guided the quadruped robot Spot along a circuitous route with multiple 90-degree turns using rotate left, rotate right, and walk forward commands. After each trial, participants rated the intuitiveness of the command mapping, while post-experiment interviews were used to gather the participants' preferences. Results showed that voice control combined with walking with Spot was the most favored and intuitive, whereas gesture control while standing caused confusion for left/right commands. Nevertheless, 29% of participants preferred gesture control, citing increased task engagement and visual congruence as reasons. An odometry-based analysis revealed that participants often followed behind Spot, particularly in the gesture control condition, when they were allowed to walk. In conclusion, voice control with walking produced the best outcomes. Improving physical ergonomics and adjusting gesture types could make gesture control more effective.

Piano playing requires agile, precise, and coordinated hand control that stretches the limits of dexterity. Hand motion models with the sophistication to accurately recreate piano playing have a wide range of applications in character animation, embodied AI, biomechanics, and VR/AR. In this paper, we construct a first-of-its-kind large-scale dataset that contains approximately 10 hours of 3D hand motion and audio from 15 elite-level pianists playing 153 pieces of classical music. To capture natural performances, we designed a markerless setup in which motions are reconstructed from multi-view videos using state-of-the-art pose estimation models. The motion data is further refined via inverse kinematics using the high-resolution MIDI key-pressing data obtained from sensors in a specialized Yamaha Disklavier piano. Leveraging the collected dataset, we developed a pipeline that can synthesize physically-plausible hand motions for musical scores outside of the dataset. Our approach employs a combination of imitation learning and reinforcement learning to obtain policies for physics-based bimanual control involving the interaction between hands and piano keys. To solve the sampling efficiency problem with the large motion dataset, we use a diffusion model to generate natural reference motions, which provide high-level trajectory and fingering (finger order and placement) information. However, the generated reference motion alone does not provide sufficient accuracy for piano performance modeling. We then further augmented the data by using musical similarity to retrieve similar motions from the captured dataset to boost the precision of the RL policy. With the proposed method, our model generates natural, dexterous motions that generalize to music from outside the training dataset.

Robotic foundation models pre-trained on human demonstration videos have shown promise, but a significant embodiment gap remains when the resulting policies are deployed on real robots. A common remedy is to fine-tune these models on robot-specific demonstrations. However, robot data collection can be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, which is particularly acute in dexterous manipulation, e.g., teleoperating a multi-fingered hand for even a single atomic task can take days. To address this, we introduce Dexterous Point Policy, a framework that learns dexterous manipulation policies directly from human videos and requires no robot demonstrations. Our core insight is that a unified 3D keypoint representation can bridge human and robot embodiments when used for both observations and actions. Specifically, we extract 3D keypoints of task-relevant objects and human hands from raw videos, and train an autoregressive transformer over these keypoints. We observe that at the keypoint level, specifically the wrist and fingertips, human and robot behaviors closely align, enabling direct policy transfer. On a suite of real-robot tasks spanning pick-and-place and tool use, Dexterous Point Policy attains 75.0% success, whereas a state-of-the-art VLA baseline reaches only 1.0%. Furthermore, our method generalizes strongly to unseen scenarios, including multi-object environments and novel object categories.

The recently emerging text-to-motion advances have spired numerous attempts for convenient and interactive human motion generation. Yet, existing methods are largely limited to generating body motions only without considering the rich two-hand motions, let alone handling various conditions like body dynamics or texts. To break the data bottleneck, we propose BOTH57M, a novel multi-modal dataset for two-hand motion generation. Our dataset includes accurate motion tracking for the human body and hands and provides pair-wised finger-level hand annotations and body descriptions. We further provide a strong baseline method, BOTH2Hands, for the novel task: generating vivid two-hand motions from both implicit body dynamics and explicit text prompts. We first warm up two parallel body-to-hand and text-to-hand diffusion models and then utilize the cross-attention transformer for motion blending. Extensive experiments and cross-validations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and dataset for generating convincing two-hand motions from the hybrid body-and-textual conditions. Our dataset and code will be disseminated to the community for future research.

Leveraging human motion data to impart robots with versatile manipulation skills has emerged as a promising paradigm in robotic manipulation. Nevertheless, translating multi-source human hand motions into feasible robot behaviors remains challenging, particularly for robots equipped with multi-fingered dexterous hands characterized by complex, high-dimensional action spaces. Moreover, existing approaches often struggle to produce policies capable of adapting to diverse environmental conditions. In this paper, we introduce HERMES, a human-to-robot learning framework for mobile bimanual dexterous manipulation. First, HERMES formulates a unified reinforcement learning approach capable of seamlessly transforming heterogeneous human hand motions from multiple sources into physically plausible robotic behaviors. Subsequently, to mitigate the sim2real gap, we devise an end-to-end, depth image-based sim2real transfer method for improved generalization to real-world scenarios. Furthermore, to enable autonomous operation in varied and unstructured environments, we augment the navigation foundation model with a closed-loop Perspective-n-Point (PnP) localization mechanism, ensuring precise alignment of visual goals and effectively bridging autonomous navigation and dexterous manipulation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HERMES consistently exhibits generalizable behaviors across diverse, in-the-wild scenarios, successfully performing numerous complex mobile bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks. Project Page:https://gemcollector.github.io/HERMES/.

Building general-purpose dexterous manipulation policies requires benchmarks that go beyond isolated tasks to systematically evaluate policies across diverse interaction modes, sensory conditions, and robot embodiments. However, existing benchmarks remain limited in task and data diversity, embodiment coverage, or controllable visual variation, hindering studies of cross-task and cross-embodiment generalization. We present DexVerse, a large-scale and modular benchmark for dexterous manipulation. DexVerse includes 100 tasks spanning a broad range of manipulation skills, including object grasping and relocation, articulated-object interaction, functional tool use, bimanual coordination, non-prehensile control, contact-rich behaviors, multi-goal execution, and long-horizon multi-stage task completion. It supports 3 robot arms and 6 dexterous hands, and is extensible to new tasks, assets, and embodiments. To evaluate visuomotor generalization, DexVerse provides configurable visual variations in textures, background, lighting, and camera viewpoints. We further provide a VR-based teleoperation interface and 3,180 demonstrations with synchronized proprioceptive, RGB, depth, point-cloud, and state observations. We benchmark representative methods, including Diffusion Policy, DP3, OpenVLA, and π_{0.5}, across 19 tasks. Results reveal substantial challenges in task generalization and visuomotor robustness, establishing DexVerse as a promising testbed for general-purpose dexterous manipulation. Project page: https://ycyao216.github.io/DexVerse.site

Dexterous manipulation is a cornerstone capability for robotic systems aiming to interact with the physical world in a human-like manner. Although vision-based methods have advanced rapidly, tactile sensing remains crucial for fine-grained control, particularly in unstructured or visually occluded settings. We present ViTacFormer, a representation-learning approach that couples a cross-attention encoder to fuse high-resolution vision and touch with an autoregressive tactile prediction head that anticipates future contact signals. Building on this architecture, we devise an easy-to-challenging curriculum that steadily refines the visual-tactile latent space, boosting both accuracy and robustness. The learned cross-modal representation drives imitation learning for multi-fingered hands, enabling precise and adaptive manipulation. Across a suite of challenging real-world benchmarks, our method achieves approximately 50% higher success rates than prior state-of-the-art systems. To our knowledge, it is also the first to autonomously complete long-horizon dexterous manipulation tasks that demand highly precise control with an anthropomorphic hand, successfully executing up to 11 sequential stages and sustaining continuous operation for 2.5 minutes.

The transfer of manipulation skills from human demonstration to robotic execution is often hindered by a "domain gap" in sensing and morphology. This paper introduces MagiClaw, a versatile two-finger end-effector designed to bridge this gap. MagiClaw functions interchangeably as both a handheld tool for intuitive data collection and a robotic end-effector for policy deployment, ensuring hardware consistency and reliability. Each finger incorporates a Soft Polyhedral Network (SPN) with an embedded camera, enabling vision-based estimation of 6-DoF forces and contact deformation. This proprioceptive data is fused with exteroceptive environmental sensing from an integrated iPhone, which provides 6D pose, RGB video, and LiDAR-based depth maps. Through a custom iOS application, MagiClaw streams synchronized, multi-modal data for real-time teleoperation, offline policy learning, and immersive control via mixed-reality interfaces. We demonstrate how this unified system architecture lowers the barrier to collecting high-fidelity, contact-rich datasets and accelerates the development of generalizable manipulation policies. Please refer to the iOS app at https://apps.apple.com/cn/app/magiclaw/id6661033548 for further details.

Generalizable humanoid loco-manipulation poses significant challenges, requiring coordinated whole-body control and precise, contact-rich object manipulation. To address this, this paper introduces HOMIE, a semi-autonomous teleoperation system that combines a reinforcement learning policy for body control mapped to a pedal, an isomorphic exoskeleton arm for arm control, and motion-sensing gloves for hand control, forming a unified cockpit to freely operate humanoids and establish a data flywheel. The policy incorporates novel designs, including an upper-body pose curriculum, a height-tracking reward, and symmetry utilization. These features enable the system to perform walking and squatting to specific heights while seamlessly adapting to arbitrary upper-body poses. The exoskeleton, by eliminating the reliance on inverse dynamics, delivers faster and more precise arm control. The gloves utilize Hall sensors instead of servos, allowing even compact devices to achieve 15 or more degrees of freedom and freely adapt to any model of dexterous hands. Compared to previous teleoperation systems, HOMIE stands out for its exceptional efficiency, completing tasks in half the time; its expanded working range, allowing users to freely reach high and low areas as well as interact with any objects; and its affordability, with a price of just $500. The system is fully open-source, demos and code can be found in our https://homietele.github.io/.

Bimanual robot systems substantially expand manipulation capabilities, but coordinating two arms introduces additional control complexity and failure modes that are not well captured by existing benchmarks. We introduce DuoBench, an extensible benchmarking framework for bimanual manipulation policies on the FR3 Duo platform. DuoBench comprises eleven tasks spanning four coordination categories, implemented in simulation and partially reproduced in the real world through reproducible task recipes with 3D-printable assets. In addition, we propose a stage-based evaluation scheme that supports fine-grained semantic failure analysis beyond binary success and provide human-teleoperated datasets for all benchmark tasks. We benchmark several dual-arm imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies in simulation and on real hardware. Our results show that current policies remain challenged by bimanual manipulation, particularly in early interaction stages, parallel arm execution, and transfer between simulation and real-world settings. DuoBench provides a reproducible testbed for diagnosing these failure modes and studying future methods for dual-arm policy learning. Code, datasets, and videos are available at https://duobench.github.io/

Bimanual manipulation with dexterous hands has attracted growing attention in research on robotic action models. However, few studies have developed benchmarks specifically tailored for dexterous manipulation, leaving the dexterous manipulation capabilities of existing models insufficiently characterized. In this paper, we present BiDex-100, a simulation benchmark for bimanual dexterous manipulation that combines broad task coverage, multi-dimensional evaluation, and high-DoF hand embodiments. Concretely, the benchmark comprises 106 tasks organized along five capability axes: generalization, instruction following, limited demonstrations, long horizon, and memory. Each task is paired with an out-of-domain variant featuring controlled visual and spatial changes, allowing systematic assessment of robustness. In addition, the benchmark supports two embodiments and provides 8,080 success-validated teleoperated demonstrations, totaling 6.25 million frames. We evaluate seven recent Vision-Language-Action models under a unified protocol, establishing baselines for capability-specific performance, robustness, and data efficiency. The website is available at https://BiDex-100.github.io/BiDex-100/.

Dexterous interaction with articulated objects is important for household, assistive, and humanoid manipulation, where multi-finger hands can provide compliant contact patterns beyond parallel-jaw grasping. However, articulated-object manipulation differs from static-object manipulation: the target part cannot be directly actuated, and its motion must emerge through sustained physical hand--handle contact. This makes the transition from object-centric articulated generation to hand-driven dexterous hand--object interaction non-trivial, since geometric trajectory replay or open-loop execution does not model the contact dynamics required to move the articulated part. Moreover, policies trained only for task completion under fixed dynamics can overfit nominal contact loads, especially without tactile or force feedback, and may degrade when the contact load changes. To address these challenges, we present DragMesh-2, a contact-driven framework for dexterous interaction with articulated objects that extends articulated interaction from object-centric generation to hand-driven dexterous hand--object interaction, where articulated motion must arise through physical contact. We further propose PICA, a physically informed contact-aware training mechanism that injects physical signals into policy learning without tactile or force feedback, improving robustness and task success under changing contact loads. Finally, we conduct systematic evaluation across multiple damping conditions and articulated-object categories to study robustness under contact-load variation, and provide a pure-geometry dexterous interaction resource to support future loco-manipulation and humanoid hand--object interaction research. Across seven GAPartNet objects, DragMesh-2 achieves stronger robustness under contact-load variation than the compared methods while maintaining high task success across damping conditions.

Motor control is a fundamental process that underlies all voluntary behavioral responses. Several different theories based on different principles (task dynamics, equilibrium-point theory, passive-motion paradigm, active inference, optimal control) account for specific aspects of how actions are produced, but fail to provide a unified view on this problem. Here we propose a concise theory of motor control based on three principles: optimal feedback control, control with a receding time horizon, and task representation by a series of via-points updated at fixed frequency. By construction, the theory provides a suitable solution to the degrees-of-freedom problem, i.e. trajectory formation in the presence of redundancies and noise. We show through computer simulations that the theory also explains the production of discrete, continuous, rhythmic and temporally-constrained movements, and their parametric and statistical properties (scaling laws, power laws, speed/accuracy tradeoffs). The theory has no free parameters and only limited variations in its implementation details and in the nature of noise are necessary to guarantee its explanatory power.

Despite recent progress in dexterous reference tracking, existing models focus primarily on single-hand manipulation and a limited range of interactions, leaving the bimanual dexterous behaviors common in real life unaddressed. The scarcity of contact-rich bimanual manipulation data and the increased complexity of coordinating contacts make developing a generalist bimanual tracker particularly challenging. Therefore, we present 1) DONIC, the first generalist bimanual tracker jointly trained across operation categories and human-motion sources, together with 2) BiHOI, a multi-view dataset of 1,575 sequences spanning 229 objects and emphasizing sustained bimanual interaction, where reconstructed interactions are retargeted into robot references. DONIC combines proximal policy optimization with behavioral cloning in a feedback loop that recycles verified successful executions into training demonstrations. An object-centered per-hand reward maintains object-motion feedback while supervising each hand according to its reference contact role. Clip-Centered Advantages remove reference-dependent advantage offsets while preserving within-trajectory differences. Together, these designs enable one single policy to learn coordinated manipulation across heterogeneous references. Without finetuning, a single checkpoint achieves 86.79% success on unseen trajectories of training objects and 57.32% on held-out objects, surpassing the state-of-the-art bimanual tracking baselines by 77.36 and 45.73 percentage points.

General-purpose manipulation requires reliable behavior across embodiments, objects, and task demands. We introduce HandsOn, a composable simulation platform and benchmark for cross-embodiment dexterous manipulation. It supports five robotic arms, six dexterous hands, and approximately 200 rigid, articulated, and deformable assets in randomized scenes. The benchmark pairs 18,000 curated human demonstrations with 66 human-verified tasks: Core-50 supports demonstration-based learning and execution tests, while Transfer-16 evaluates asset and relation transfer, skill composition, and deformable manipulation without target-task training demonstrations. Qualitative real-robot rollouts illustrate sim-to-real transfer. Across diffusion, vision-language-action, world-action, and prompted VLM-based methods, the best trained multi-task policy achieves 29.1% Core-50 success. Without benchmark finetuning, GPT-6 using move_eef for palm-and-finger control achieves 5.2% on Core-50 and 1.9% on Transfer-16 over 660 trials. Trained-policy stage diagnostics expose failures in contact establishment, action coordination, and maintaining achieved goals, with additional sequencing errors in composed tasks. HandsOn provides a shared basis for investigating manipulation generalization and the limits of reliable physical interaction.

Collecting naturalistic human manipulation demonstrations with accurate contact force and hand pose is essential for robot dexterous manipulation policy and foundational world model learning - yet no existing wearable platform provides both calibrated fingertip force sensing and occlusion-resilient hand tracking in a form factor that preserves natural manipulation behavior. We present Tactus, a textile-integrated sensing glove that co-optimizes three design pillars: (1) a thin, conformal 3D-knit form factor (1.5 mm fingertip stackup) designed to minimize interference with natural manipulation, (2) strategically placed capacitive tactile sensors at manipulation-relevant regions informed by empirical contact studies, and (3) IMU-fused pose tracking that maintains accuracy through the hand-object occlusions where manipulation data is most valuable. Tactus includes a documented calibration pipeline for cross-glove consistency and per-session calibration for subject-dependent correction. To enable objective comparison, we introduce standardized benchmarking protocols for tactile force regression and hand pose estimation, and apply them to Tactus and two commercially available tactile gloves - to our knowledge the first quantitative cross-platform evaluation of this kind. Tactus resolves a minimum detectable force of 0.59 N at 95% confidence, 1.6 - 2.7x lower than the commercial baselines, and with 0.87 cross-participant consistency, while our pose tracking sustains 11.0 mm fingertip keypoint relative error during manipulation, when occlusion is heaviest. We show that these combined signals support object property estimation, slip detection, and representative recording of hand-object interaction - yielding demonstration data with the fidelity required for contact-aware manipulation policies and world models.

In-hand manipulation of pen-like objects is an important skill in our daily lives, as many tools such as hammers and screwdrivers are similarly shaped. However, current learning-based methods struggle with this task due to a lack of high-quality demonstrations and the significant gap between simulation and the real world. In this work, we push the boundaries of learning-based in-hand manipulation systems by demonstrating the capability to spin pen-like objects. We first use reinforcement learning to train an oracle policy with privileged information and generate a high-fidelity trajectory dataset in simulation. This serves two purposes: 1) pre-training a sensorimotor policy in simulation; 2) conducting open-loop trajectory replay in the real world. We then fine-tune the sensorimotor policy using these real-world trajectories to adapt it to the real world dynamics. With less than 50 trajectories, our policy learns to rotate more than ten pen-like objects with different physical properties for multiple revolutions. We present a comprehensive analysis of our design choices and share the lessons learned during development.

Hand-object interaction (HOI) is fundamental for humans to express intent. Existing HOI generation research is predominantly confined to fixed grasping patterns, where control is tied to physical priors such as force closure or generic intent instructions, even when expressed through elaborate language. Such an overly general conditioning imposes a strong inductive bias for stable grasps, thus failing to capture the diversity of daily HOI. To address these limitations, we introduce Free-Form HOI Generation, which aims to generate controllable, diverse, and physically plausible HOI conditioned on fine-grained intent, extending HOI from grasping to free-form interactions, like pushing, poking, and rotating. To support this task, we construct WildO2, an in-the-wild diverse 3D HOI dataset, which includes diverse HOI derived from internet videos. Specifically, it contains 4.4k unique interactions across 92 intents and 610 object categories, each with detailed semantic annotations. Building on this dataset, we propose TOUCH, a three-stage framework centered on a multi-level diffusion model that facilitates fine-grained semantic control to generate versatile hand poses beyond grasping priors. This process leverages explicit contact modeling for conditioning and is subsequently refined with contact consistency and physical constraints to ensure realism. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our method's ability to generate controllable, diverse, and physically plausible hand interactions representative of daily activities. The project page is https://guangyid.github.io/hoi123touch{here}.

Touch is a crucial sensing modality that provides rich information about object properties and interactions with the physical environment. Humans and robots both benefit from using touch to perceive and interact with the surrounding environment (Johansson and Flanagan, 2009; Li et al., 2020; Calandra et al., 2017). However, no existing systems provide rich, multi-modal digital touch-sensing capabilities through a hemispherical compliant embodiment. Here, we describe several conceptual and technological innovations to improve the digitization of touch. These advances are embodied in an artificial finger-shaped sensor with advanced sensing capabilities. Significantly, this fingertip contains high-resolution sensors (~8.3 million taxels) that respond to omnidirectional touch, capture multi-modal signals, and use on-device artificial intelligence to process the data in real time. Evaluations show that the artificial fingertip can resolve spatial features as small as 7 um, sense normal and shear forces with a resolution of 1.01 mN and 1.27 mN, respectively, perceive vibrations up to 10 kHz, sense heat, and even sense odor. Furthermore, it embeds an on-device AI neural network accelerator that acts as a peripheral nervous system on a robot and mimics the reflex arc found in humans. These results demonstrate the possibility of digitizing touch with superhuman performance. The implications are profound, and we anticipate potential applications in robotics (industrial, medical, agricultural, and consumer-level), virtual reality and telepresence, prosthetics, and e-commerce. Toward digitizing touch at scale, we open-source a modular platform to facilitate future research on the nature of touch.

Many real-world manipulation tasks consist of a series of subtasks that are significantly different from one another. Such long-horizon, complex tasks highlight the potential of dexterous hands, which possess adaptability and versatility, capable of seamlessly transitioning between different modes of functionality without the need for re-grasping or external tools. However, the challenges arise due to the high-dimensional action space of dexterous hand and complex compositional dynamics of the long-horizon tasks. We present Sequential Dexterity, a general system based on reinforcement learning (RL) that chains multiple dexterous policies for achieving long-horizon task goals. The core of the system is a transition feasibility function that progressively finetunes the sub-policies for enhancing chaining success rate, while also enables autonomous policy-switching for recovery from failures and bypassing redundant stages. Despite being trained only in simulation with a few task objects, our system demonstrates generalization capability to novel object shapes and is able to zero-shot transfer to a real-world robot equipped with a dexterous hand. More details and video results could be found at https://sequential-dexterity.github.io

Handheld data collection systems, such as the Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI), enable scalable data collection across diverse environments but only capture observed actions rather than the desired actions executed by a robot controller. In contrast, teleoperation captures desired actions directly, but is prohibitively time-consuming to collect. We revisit this trade-off through the lens of action validity across task phases. We observe that handheld trajectories provide valid supervision in tolerant, free-space phases, but lack dynamic feasibility in contact-sensitive phases, where tracking observed trajectories at high stiffness produces large, unsafe contact forces. We study the interaction between these two supervision types for contact-rich manipulation and find that training policies that combine handheld data with a small number of targeted teleoperated demonstrations provide an efficient hybrid strategy. Specifically, rather than teleoperating the entire task, we only collect partial teleoperated demonstrations for task segments where base handheld policies fail. However, naively mixing handheld and teleoperated phase-specific data yields worse performance than training on handheld data alone. To address this mismatch between observed and desired supervision, we propose Bi-modal Routing for Imitation Data via Gated Experts (BRIDGE), a mixture of diffusion policy experts that routes between specialist task phase heads conditioned on the current robot state. Notably, our approach enables task-phase specific use of desired actions during contact sensitive segments and improves success rates over handheld-only baselines by up to 36.7% across three contact-rich manipulation tasks.

Dexterous manipulation remains challenging due to the cost of collecting real-robot teleoperation data, the heterogeneity of hand embodiments, and the high dimensionality of control. We present UniDex, a robot foundation suite that couples a large-scale robot-centric dataset with a unified vision-language-action (VLA) policy and a practical human-data capture setup for universal dexterous hand control. First, we construct UniDex-Dataset, a robot-centric dataset over 50K trajectories across eight dexterous hands (6--24 DoFs), derived from egocentric human video datasets. To transform human data into robot-executable trajectories, we employ a human-in-the-loop retargeting procedure to align fingertip trajectories while preserving plausible hand-object contacts, and we operate on explicit 3D pointclouds with human hands masked to narrow kinematic and visual gaps. Second, we introduce the Function-Actuator-Aligned Space (FAAS), a unified action space that maps functionally similar actuators to shared coordinates, enabling cross-hand transfer. Leveraging FAAS as the action parameterization, we train UniDex-VLA, a 3D VLA policy pretrained on UniDex-Dataset and finetuned with task demonstrations. In addition, we build UniDex-Cap, a simple portable capture setup that records synchronized RGB-D streams and human hand poses and converts them into robot-executable trajectories to enable human-robot data co-training that reduces reliance on costly robot demonstrations. On challenging tool-use tasks across two different hands, UniDex-VLA achieves 81% average task progress and outperforms prior VLA baselines by a large margin, while exhibiting strong spatial, object, and zero-shot cross-hand generalization. Together, UniDex-Dataset, UniDex-VLA, and UniDex-Cap provide a scalable foundation suite for universal dexterous manipulation.

Dexterous manipulation with contact-rich interactions is crucial for advanced robotics. While recent diffusion-based planning approaches show promise for simple manipulation tasks, they often produce unrealistic ghost states (e.g., the object automatically moves without hand contact) or lack adaptability when handling complex sequential interactions. In this work, we introduce DexHandDiff, an interaction-aware diffusion planning framework for adaptive dexterous manipulation. DexHandDiff models joint state-action dynamics through a dual-phase diffusion process which consists of pre-interaction contact alignment and post-contact goal-directed control, enabling goal-adaptive generalizable dexterous manipulation. Additionally, we incorporate dynamics model-based dual guidance and leverage large language models for automated guidance function generation, enhancing generalizability for physical interactions and facilitating diverse goal adaptation through language cues. Experiments on physical interaction tasks such as door opening, pen and block re-orientation, object relocation, and hammer striking demonstrate DexHandDiff's effectiveness on goals outside training distributions, achieving over twice the average success rate (59.2% vs. 29.5%) compared to existing methods. Our framework achieves an average of 70.7% success rate on goal adaptive dexterous tasks, highlighting its robustness and flexibility in contact-rich manipulation.

The deep learning models has significantly advanced dexterous manipulation techniques for multi-fingered hand grasping. However, the contact information-guided grasping in cluttered environments remains largely underexplored. To address this gap, we have developed a method for generating multi-fingered hand grasp samples in cluttered settings through contact semantic map. We introduce a contact semantic conditional variational autoencoder network (CoSe-CVAE) for creating comprehensive contact semantic map from object point cloud. We utilize grasp detection method to estimate hand grasp poses from the contact semantic map. Finally, an unified grasp evaluation model PointNetGPD++ is designed to assess grasp quality and collision probability, substantially improving the reliability of identifying optimal grasps in cluttered scenarios. Our grasp generation method has demonstrated remarkable success, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by at least 4.65% with 81.0% average grasping success rate in real-world single-object environment and 75.3% grasping success rate in cluttered scenes. We also proposed the multi-modal multi-fingered grasping dataset generation method. Our multi-fingered hand grasping dataset outperforms previous datasets in scene diversity, modality diversity. The dataset, code and supplementary materials can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/contact-dexnet.

Mobile bimanual dexterous manipulation requires continuous coordination of locomotion, whole-body motion, and finger-level dexterity within a single trajectory, creating a severe robot demonstration bottleneck. Egocentric human demonstrations offer a scalable alternative, but prior approaches ease the transfer by simplifying human motion, discarding exactly the fine-grained, coupled structure such tasks depend on. We present DexRoam, a complete system for learning mobile bimanual dexterous manipulation from human demonstrations, in which whole-body motion remains continuous and coupled throughout the human-to-robot transfer process. To enable scalable collection of whole-body human manipulation demonstrations, we develop a tracker-free capture system using only a consumer VR headset and a head-mounted stereo camera, without external cameras or motion trackers. We then perform three explicit alignment stages---embodiment, action-semantic, and temporal---to map captured motion into the robot action space, preserving fine-grained whole-body motion and allowing human and robot demonstrations to be jointly learned by standard VLA policies. Real-world experiments with different VLA backbones show that human demonstrations consistently improve policy learning across training paradigms, raising average success from 29% to 56% on GR00T N1.7 and from 32% to 57% on pi0.5, while matching robot-only training with half the robot demonstrations. Ablations confirm that each alignment stage is necessary. These results highlight the potential of human demonstrations for scalable whole-body mobile manipulation with preserved fine-grained motion structure.

Robotics faces a fundamental challenge of data scarcity. Unlike language or vision research, there is no internet-scale dataset for robotic manipulation. A promising path forward is to leverage egocentric human data, which can be collected more easily, with greater breadth, and at a larger scale. Towards this end, we investigate key design choices for learning across human and humanoid embodiments equipped with dexterous five-finger hands, using the π_{0.5} model as a foundation. Our results show that human data enables robots to learn new task semantics and compose existing skills into novel behaviors without corresponding robot data. The paper website is here: https://egopipaper.github.io/

Synthesizing realistic piano hand motions requires both precision and naturalness. Physics-based methods achieve precision but produce stiff motions; data-driven models learn natural dynamics but struggle with positional accuracy. Piano motion exhibits a natural hierarchy: fingertip positions are nearly deterministic given piano geometry and fingering, while wrist and intermediate joints offer stylistic freedom. We present [OURS], a four-stage framework exploiting this hierarchy: (1) statistics-based fingertip positioning, (2) FiLM-conditioned trajectory refinement, (3) wrist estimation, and (4) STGCN-based pose synthesis. We contribute expert-annotated fingerings for the FürElise dataset (153 pieces, ~10 hours). Experiments demonstrate F1 = 0.910, substantially outperforming diffusion baselines (F1 = 0.121), with user study (N=41) confirming quality approaching motion capture. Expert evaluation by professional pianists (N=5) identified anticipatory motion as the key remaining gap, providing concrete directions for future improvement.

In this work, we present HandMvNet, one of the first real-time method designed to estimate 3D hand motion and shape from multi-view camera images. Unlike previous monocular approaches, which suffer from scale-depth ambiguities, our method ensures consistent and accurate absolute hand poses and shapes. This is achieved through a multi-view attention-fusion mechanism that effectively integrates features from multiple viewpoints. In contrast to previous multi-view methods, our approach eliminates the need for camera parameters as input to learn 3D geometry. HandMvNet also achieves a substantial reduction in inference time while delivering competitive results compared to the state-of-the-art methods, making it suitable for real-time applications. Evaluated on publicly available datasets, HandMvNet qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms previous methods under identical settings. Code is available at github.com/pyxploiter/handmvnet.

Replicating human--level dexterity remains a fundamental robotics challenge, requiring integrated solutions from mechatronic design to the control of high degree--of--freedom (DoF) robotic hands. While imitation learning shows promise in transferring human dexterity to robots, the efficacy of trained policies relies on the quality of human demonstration data. We bridge this gap with a hand--arm teleoperation system featuring: (1) a 20--DoF linkage--driven anthropomorphic robotic hand for biomimetic dexterity, and (2) an optimization--based motion retargeting for real--time, high--fidelity reproduction of intricate human hand motions and seamless hand--arm coordination. We validate the system via extensive empirical evaluations, including dexterous in-hand manipulation tasks and a long--horizon task requiring the organization of a cluttered makeup table randomly populated with nine objects. Experimental results demonstrate its intuitive teleoperation interface with real--time control and the ability to generate high--quality demonstration data. Please refer to the accompanying video for further details.

Achieving successful robotic manipulation is an essential step towards robots being widely used in industry and home settings. Recently, many learning-based methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge, with imitation learning showing great promise. However, imperfect demonstrations and a lack of feedback from teleoperation systems may lead to poor or even unsafe results. In this work we explore the effect of demonstrator force feedback on imitation learning, using a feedback glove and a robot arm to render fingertip-level and palm-level forces, respectively. 10 participants recorded 5 demonstrations of a pick-and-place task with 3 grippers, under conditions with no force feedback, fingertip force feedback, and fingertip and palm force feedback. Results show that force feedback significantly reduces demonstrator fingertip and palm forces, leads to a lower variation in demonstrator forces, and recorded trajectories that a quicker to execute. Using behavioral cloning, we find that agents trained to imitate these trajectories mirror these benefits, even though agents have no force data shown to them during training. We conclude that immersive demonstrations, achieved with force feedback, may be the key to unlocking safer, quicker to execute dexterous manipulation policies.

GPT-6 Astra exhibits a remarkable ability to generate numerical robot actions, extending its role beyond high-level planning. To assess Astra's capabilities as general-purpose embodied policies, we conduct comprehensive evaluations across six domains, examining direct control, cooperation with learned policies, and feedback-driven adaptation. In gripper manipulation, Astra can correct task targets and prepare contact conditions for subsequent policy execution; hybrid control with π0.5 achieves 48% success on the evaluated RoboDojo subset. In dexterous manipulation, hybrid control achieves 50% success in ten experience-guided DexJoCo trials, while direct in-hand control struggles to coordinate finger contacts. In mobile manipulation, hybrid control reaches 38.7% success on the evaluated RoboCasa365. In navigation, Astra leads our local comparisons, reaching 92% success on RxR instruction following and 82% on HM3D object search, although search incurs substantial detours. In locomotion, dense motion-reference generation remains unreliable: none of five sequential attempts on a single obstacle course reaches the goal, despite improvements in stability and forward progress. In humanoid loco-manipulation, Astra exceeds baseline methods on 13 of 30 HumanoidBench tasks with pretrained whole-body controllers. These findings reveal a gap between useful task decisions and reliable physical control. Inference latency further constrains practical control: across 50 RoboDojo instances per condition, policy-assisted and direct control consume 624.8 million and 1.132 billion tokens. A 30-second locomotion run requires 250 model calls averaging 39.86 seconds each, with physics paused during inference.

We address the challenge of developing a generalizable neural tracking controller for dexterous manipulation from human references. This controller aims to manage a dexterous robot hand to manipulate diverse objects for various purposes defined by kinematic human-object interactions. Developing such a controller is complicated by the intricate contact dynamics of dexterous manipulation and the need for adaptivity, generalizability, and robustness. Current reinforcement learning and trajectory optimization methods often fall short due to their dependence on task-specific rewards or precise system models. We introduce an approach that curates large-scale successful robot tracking demonstrations, comprising pairs of human references and robot actions, to train a neural controller. Utilizing a data flywheel, we iteratively enhance the controller's performance, as well as the number and quality of successful tracking demonstrations. We exploit available tracking demonstrations and carefully integrate reinforcement learning and imitation learning to boost the controller's performance in dynamic environments. At the same time, to obtain high-quality tracking demonstrations, we individually optimize per-trajectory tracking by leveraging the learned tracking controller in a homotopy optimization method. The homotopy optimization, mimicking chain-of-thought, aids in solving challenging trajectory tracking problems to increase demonstration diversity. We showcase our success by training a generalizable neural controller and evaluating it in both simulation and real world. Our method achieves over a 10% improvement in success rates compared to leading baselines. The project website with animated results is available at https://meowuu7.github.io/DexTrack/.

The proliferation of XR devices has made egocentric hand pose estimation a vital task, yet this perspective is inherently challenged by frequent finger occlusions. To address this, we propose a novel approach that leverages the rich information in dorsal hand skin deformation, unlocked by recent advances in dense visual featurizers. We introduce a dual-stream delta encoder that learns pose by contrasting features from a dynamic hand with a baseline relaxed position. Our evaluation demonstrates that, using only cropped dorsal images, our method reduces the Mean Per Joint Angle Error (MPJAE) by 18% in self-occluded scenarios (fingers >= 50% occluded) compared to state-of-the-art techniques that depend on the whole hand's geometry and large model backbones. Consequently, our method not only enhances the reliability of downstream tasks like index finger pinch and tap estimation in occluded scenarios but also unlocks new interaction paradigms, such as detecting isometric force for a surface "click" without visible movement while minimizing model size.

The ability to grasp objects, signal with gestures, and share emotion through touch all stem from the unique capabilities of human hands. Yet creating high-quality personalized hand avatars from images remains challenging due to complex geometry, appearance, and articulation, particularly under unconstrained lighting and limited views. Progress has also been limited by the lack of datasets that jointly provide accurate 3D geometry, high-resolution multiview imagery, and a diverse population of subjects. To address this, we present PALM, a large-scale dataset comprising 13k high-quality hand scans from 263 subjects and 90k multi-view images, capturing rich variation in skin tone, age, and geometry. To show its utility, we present a baseline PALM-Net, a multi-subject prior over hand geometry and material properties learned via physically based inverse rendering, enabling realistic, relightable single-image hand avatar personalization. PALM's scale and diversity make it a valuable real-world resource for hand modeling and related research.

Learning from demonstrations has shown to be an effective approach to robotic manipulation, especially with the recently collected large-scale robot data with teleoperation systems. Building an efficient teleoperation system across diverse robot platforms has become more crucial than ever. However, there is a notable lack of cost-effective and user-friendly teleoperation systems for different end-effectors, e.g., anthropomorphic robot hands and grippers, that can operate across multiple platforms. To address this issue, we develop ACE, a cross-platform visual-exoskeleton system for low-cost dexterous teleoperation. Our system utilizes a hand-facing camera to capture 3D hand poses and an exoskeleton mounted on a portable base, enabling accurate real-time capture of both finger and wrist poses. Compared to previous systems, which often require hardware customization according to different robots, our single system can generalize to humanoid hands, arm-hands, arm-gripper, and quadruped-gripper systems with high-precision teleoperation. This enables imitation learning for complex manipulation tasks on diverse platforms.

Humanoid whole-body manipulation has advanced rapidly, enabling policies to coordinate locomotion, posture, bimanual interaction, and dexterous hand movements. Meanwhile, egocentric human videos provide diverse examples of everyday interactions across objects and scenes, offering scalable supervision without robot operation. However, existing supervision from these videos provides limited coverage of whole-body movement and coordination with hand-object interaction, while obtaining such supervision through humanoid teleoperation is also costly and difficult to scale. We therefore explore how human experience can support scalable learning of humanoid loco-manipulation. To support this study, we introduce HumanVerse-500, a 500-hour dataset of diverse human loco-manipulation behaviors in open-world environments, collected with a lightweight wearable system that synchronizes egocentric video with body and hand motion. Building on this dataset, we develop λ_0, a whole-body humanoid vision-language-action policy, through three-stage training that first learns interaction from diverse egocentric datasets, then coordinates body and hand motion using HumanVerse-500, and finally adapts the policy to downstream tasks and robot embodiments. Across these stages, λ_0 learns a shared representation space for human experience transfer, while domain-specific interfaces handle differences between human and robot states and actions. We evaluate λ_0 on SIMPLE and 4 real-world loco-manipulation tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance, and further analyze its scaling behavior, generalization, and training-stage contributions to understand how human data support downstream whole-body humanoid control. We will release our code, models, and data to support further research.

Most learned dexterous grasp generators relegate contact forces to a downstream verification step, so a kinematically-plausible pose can still violate the conditions for a stable physical grasp. We address this with EquiDexFlow, an SE(3)-equivariant flow-matching model that jointly predicts wrist pose, joint angles, fingertip contacts, surface normals, and contact forces from an object point cloud. Our architecture projects contacts onto the object surface and forces into the Coulomb friction cone by construction, so placement and friction compliance hold without loss penalties. We prove end-to-end SE(3) equivariance and verify it empirically over 200 rotations, with wrist residuals below 0.04^circ and exactly zero joint deviation. Trained on 8,100 force-closure grasps across 81 objects for the 16-DoF Allegro Hand, our model achieves zero friction violations, the best composite score, and the lowest wrench residual among all ablation variants. We retarget decoded fingertip contacts to a 16-DoF LEAP Hand via per-finger inverse kinematics, and our hardware-feasible refinement places every joint at least 5% inside its actuator envelope while preserving wrench balance. On the physical robot, retargeted EquiDexFlow-decoded grasps complete open-loop pick-and-hold trials on all six test objects, with every asymmetric object succeeding at both the canonical pose and a 120^circ co-rotation. Videos, code, and checkpoints are available at https://equidexflow.github.io.

Bimanual manipulation is challenging due to precise spatial and temporal coordination required between two arms. While there exist several real-world bimanual systems, there is a lack of simulated benchmarks with a large task diversity for systematically studying bimanual capabilities across a wide range of tabletop tasks. This paper addresses the gap by extending RLBench to bimanual manipulation. We open-source our code and benchmark comprising 13 new tasks with 23 unique task variations, each requiring a high degree of coordination and adaptability. To kickstart the benchmark, we extended several state-of-the art methods to bimanual manipulation and also present a language-conditioned behavioral cloning agent -- PerAct2, which enables the learning and execution of bimanual 6-DoF manipulation tasks. Our novel network architecture efficiently integrates language processing with action prediction, allowing robots to understand and perform complex bimanual tasks in response to user-specified goals. Project website with code is available at: http://bimanual.github.io

Humans are dexterous, but traditional data collection paradigms such as teleoperation, kinesthetic teaching, and wearable exoskeletons force humans to act through the robot embodiment, bottlenecking their dexterity. Retargeting can avoid this. However, existing methods purely translate kinematics and ignore the real-world contact dynamics essential for task success. We present CARD: Contact-Anchored Retargeting for Dexterous Manipulation, a simulator and object-free framework that retargets human demonstrations to robot actions by explicitly preserving contact force targets. CARD unifies human data sources including video, motion capture, and tactile gloves via a shared hand--contact representation and generates explicit contact force targets in addition to kinematics. To maintain these contact targets during hardware open-loop replay, CARD also introduces a tactile tracking controller. For video which does not contain an explicit tactile source, we present Vid-HACO, our video-to-contact model that sets a new state of the art. Across our video, glove, motion-capture data and the GRAB dataset, CARD maintains contact on 43--78% of contact frames, while kinematic and object-aware retargeting methods maintain contact on <10% and 22.5% of the frames respectively. Further, integrating our formulation into physics-based retargeting improves strict task success from 12\% to 32\% on GRAB dataset. Finally, we show that our tactile tracker is critical to reproduce demonstrated forces during hardware replay. These results establish that contact preservation via CARD is a scalable interface for transferring human dexterity to robots.

Reconstructing interacting hands from a single RGB image is a very challenging task. On the one hand, severe mutual occlusion and similar local appearance between two hands confuse the extraction of visual features, resulting in the misalignment of estimated hand meshes and the image. On the other hand, there are complex spatial relationship between interacting hands, which significantly increases the solution space of hand poses and increases the difficulty of network learning. In this paper, we propose a decoupled iterative refinement framework to achieve pixel-alignment hand reconstruction while efficiently modeling the spatial relationship between hands. Specifically, we define two feature spaces with different characteristics, namely 2D visual feature space and 3D joint feature space. First, we obtain joint-wise features from the visual feature map and utilize a graph convolution network and a transformer to perform intra- and inter-hand information interaction in the 3D joint feature space, respectively. Then, we project the joint features with global information back into the 2D visual feature space in an obfuscation-free manner and utilize the 2D convolution for pixel-wise enhancement. By performing multiple alternate enhancements in the two feature spaces, our method can achieve an accurate and robust reconstruction of interacting hands. Our method outperforms all existing two-hand reconstruction methods by a large margin on the InterHand2.6M dataset.

Interacting with Large Language Models (LLMs) for text editing on mobile devices currently requires users to break out of their writing environment and switch to a conversational AI interface. In this paper, we propose to control the LLM via touch gestures performed directly on the text. We first chart a design space that covers fundamental touch input and text transformations. In this space, we then concretely explore two control mappings: spread-to-generate and pinch-to-shorten, with visual feedback loops. We evaluate this concept in a user study (N=14) that compares three feedback designs: no visualisation, text length indicator, and length + word indicator. The results demonstrate that touch-based control of LLMs is both feasible and user-friendly, with the length + word indicator proving most effective for managing text generation. This work lays the foundation for further research into gesture-based interaction with LLMs on touch devices.

Handheld paradigms offer an efficient and intuitive way for collecting large-scale demonstration of robot manipulation. However, achieving contact-rich bimanual manipulation through these methods remains a pivotal challenge, which is substantially hindered by hardware adaptability and data efficacy. Prior hardware designs remain gripper-specific and often face a trade-off between tracking precision and portability. Furthermore, the lack of online feasibility checking during demonstration leads to poor replayability. More importantly, existing handheld setups struggle to collect interactive recovery data during robot execution, lacking the authentic tactile information necessary for robust policy refinement. To bridge these gaps, we present TAMEn, a tactile-aware manipulation engine for closed-loop data collection in contact-rich tasks. Our system features a cross-morphology wearable interface that enables rapid adaptation across heterogeneous grippers. To balance data quality and environmental diversity, we implement a dual-modal acquisition pipeline: a precision mode leveraging motion capture for high-fidelity demonstrations, and a portable mode utilizing VR-based tracking for in-the-wild acquisition and tactile-visualized recovery teleoperation. Building on this hardware, we unify large-scale tactile pretraining, task-specific bimanual demonstrations, and human-in-the-loop recovery data into a pyramid-structured data regime, enabling closed-loop policy refinement. Experiments show that our feasibility-aware pipeline significantly improves demonstration replayability, and that the proposed visuo-tactile learning framework increases task success rates from 34% to 75% across diverse bimanual manipulation tasks. We further open-source the hardware and dataset to facilitate reproducibility and support research in visuo-tactile manipulation.

Dexterous manipulation with multi-fingered robot hands promises human-level dexterity, but collecting large-scale dexterous robot hand data remains difficult. Learning from human demonstrations has emerged as a scalable alternative to robot teleoperation, providing strong priors on object interaction and contact strategies. Recent sim-to-real RL methods incorporate such priors, but often (i) omit rewards that explicitly incentivize precise contact, yielding weak real-world performance, and/or (ii) generalize poorly to unseen object instances. We propose DemoMimic (Dexterous Motion Mimic), a policy that manipulates objects by focusing on their geometry local to the contact points. Its contact-centric rewards encourage precise contact and improve sim-to-real consistency, yielding a single real-world policy that transfers across objects of varying shape, scale, mass, and friction wherever local contact structure is preserved. Real-world ablations show that DemoMimic achieves 71% success across 16 objects, four tasks, and two robot-hand embodiments, with the smallest sim-to-real drop compared to baselines.

Imitation learning from human hand motion data presents a promising avenue for imbuing robots with human-like dexterity in real-world manipulation tasks. Despite this potential, substantial challenges persist, particularly with the portability of existing hand motion capture (mocap) systems and the difficulty of translating mocap data into effective control policies. To tackle these issues, we introduce DexCap, a portable hand motion capture system, alongside DexIL, a novel imitation algorithm for training dexterous robot skills directly from human hand mocap data. DexCap offers precise, occlusion-resistant tracking of wrist and finger motions based on SLAM and electromagnetic field together with 3D observations of the environment. Utilizing this rich dataset, DexIL employs inverse kinematics and point cloud-based imitation learning to replicate human actions with robot hands. Beyond learning from human motion, DexCap also offers an optional human-in-the-loop correction mechanism to refine and further improve robot performance. Through extensive evaluation across six dexterous manipulation tasks, our approach not only demonstrates superior performance but also showcases the system's capability to effectively learn from in-the-wild mocap data, paving the way for future data collection methods for dexterous manipulation. More details can be found at https://dex-cap.github.io

This paper investigates humanoid whole-body dexterous manipulation, where the efficient collection of high-quality demonstration data remains a central bottleneck. Existing teleoperation systems often suffer from limited portability, occlusion, or insufficient precision, which hinders their applicability to complex whole-body tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce HumDex, a portable teleoperation system designed for humanoid whole-body dexterous manipulation. Our system leverages IMU-based motion tracking to address the portability-precision trade-off, enabling accurate full-body tracking while remaining easy to deploy. For dexterous hand control, we further introduce a learning-based retargeting method that generates smooth and natural hand motions without manual parameter tuning. Beyond teleoperation, HumDex enables efficient collection of human motion data. Building on this capability, we propose a two-stage imitation learning framework that first pre-trains on diverse human motion data to learn generalizable priors, and then fine-tunes on robot data to bridge the embodiment gap for precise execution. We demonstrate that this approach significantly improves generalization to new configurations, objects, and backgrounds with minimal data acquisition costs. The entire system is fully reproducible and open-sourced at https://github.com/physical-superintelligence-lab/humdex.

Injury to the cervical spinal cord can cause quadriplegia, impairing muscle function in all four limbs. People with impaired hand function and mobility encounter significant difficulties in carrying out essential self-care and household tasks. Despite the impairment of their neural drive, their volitional myoelectric activity is often partially preserved. High-density electromyography (HDEMG) can detect this myoelectric activity, which can serve as control inputs to assistive devices. Previous HDEMG-controlled robotic interfaces have primarily been limited to controlling table-mounted robot arms. These have constrained reach capabilities. Instead, the ability to control mobile manipulators, which have no such workspace constraints, could allow individuals with quadriplegia to perform a greater variety of assistive tasks, thus restoring independence and reducing caregiver workload. In this study, we introduce a non-invasive wearable HDEMG interface with real-time myoelectric hand gesture recognition, enabling both coarse and fine control over the intricate mobility and manipulation functionalities of an 8 degree-of-freedom mobile manipulator. Our evaluation, involving 13 participants engaging in challenging self-care and household activities, demonstrates the potential of our wearable HDEMG system to profoundly enhance user independence by enabling non-invasive control of a mobile manipulator.

Multi-arm robot platforms, including bimanual and humanoid robots, have the capability to complete tasks with lower cycle times than single-arm systems, but they are more difficult to safely control due to the presence of multi-arm constraints. The paradigm of training generalist robot policies from massive datasets is a promising approach to address general-purpose multi-arm manipulation, but the acquisition of large multi-arm manipulation datasets remains a bottleneck. Automated demonstration generation can alleviate this burden by synthesizing new demonstrations from a handful of source demonstrations, but existing algorithms ignore multi-arm constraints and as a result often induce unsafe and unsuccessful behaviors. We address this limitation by introducing ScheduleGen, an integrated planning & scheduling algorithm for multi-arm demonstration generation. We evaluate ScheduleGen on 28 simulation task variants, including seven externally authored RoboDojo tasks and settings inaccessible to prior systems; it achieves 79.6% mean data-generation success and trains policies with 65.5% mean success. ScheduleGen policies outperform those trained on a state-of-the-art data generation baseline, and achieve 50-80% success across eight real-world variants through zero-shot sim-to-real and real-to-sim-to-real transfer. Videos and more at: https://schedulegen.github.io/

Achieving human-level manipulation requires dexterous robotic hands capable of complex object interactions. Advancing such capabilities further demands standardized benchmarks for systematic evaluation. However, existing dexterous benchmarks lack tasks that reflect the unique manipulation capabilities of dexterous hands over parallel grippers, as well as comprehensive evaluation pipelines. In this paper, we present DexJoCo, a benchmark and toolkit for task-oriented dexterous manipulation, comprising 11 functionally grounded tasks that evaluate tool-use, bimanual coordination, long-horizon execution, and reasoning. We develop a low-cost data collection system and collect 1.1K trajectories across these tasks, with support for domain randomization to assess robustness. We benchmark modern models under diverse settings, including visual and dynamics randomization, multi-task training, and action-head adaptation. Through extensive empirical analysis, we identify several important insights and common limitations of current policies in dexterous manipulation, highlighting key challenges for future research in dexterous hand robot learning. Project page available at: https://dexjoco.github.io