Abstract-- This paper presents an efficient approach for determining the joint configuration of a multifingered gripper solely from the point cloud data of its poly-articulated chain, as generated by visual sensors, simulations or even generative neural networks. Well-known inverse kinematics (IK) techniques can provide mathematically exact solutions (when they exist) for joint configuration determination based solely on the fingertip pose, but often require post-hoc decision-making by considering the positions of all intermediate phalanges in the gripper's fingers, or rely on algorithms to numerically approximate solutions for more complex kinematics. In contrast, our method leverages machine learning to implicitly overcome these challenges. This is achieved through a Conditional V ariational Auto-Encoder (CV AE), which takes point cloud data of key structural elements as input and reconstructs the corresponding joint configurations. This highlights the effectiveness of our pipeline for joint configuration estimation within the broader context of AI-driven techniques for grasp planning. Determining joint configurations for multi-fingered robotic grippers is a critical challenge from a control perspective, as precise joint control is essential for accurately positioning fingertips or phalanges at the desired contact points on the object. Indeed, several well-known approaches for generating valid grasps rely on analytical metrics, such as force-or form-closure criteria [1]-[3].

The top row shows the starting object configuration with its goal rendered as a transparent overlay, while the bottom row shows the result after the robot's motion. GD2P synthesizes diverse hand poses conditioned on object geometry, handling flat (left), volumetric (middle), and tall (right) objects. Grey arrows represent the transporting direction, whereas white volumetric dots mark the estimated fingertip contact with the object. Abstract-- Nonprehensile manipulation, such as pushing and pulling, enables robots to move, align, or reposition objects that may be difficult to grasp due to their geometry, size, or relationship to the robot or the environment. Much of the existing work in nonprehensile manipulation relies on parallel-jaw grippers or tools such as rods and spatulas. In contrast, multi-fingered dexterous hands offer richer contact modes and versatility for handling diverse objects to provide stable support over the objects, which compensates for the difficulty of modeling the dynamics of nonprehensile manipulation. Therefore, we propose G eometry-aware D exterous P ushing and P ulling (GD2P) for nonprehensile manipulation with dexterous robotic hands. We study pushing and pulling by framing the problem as synthesizing and learning pre-contact dexterous hand poses that lead to effective manipulation. We generate diverse hand poses via contact-guided sampling, filter them using physics simulation, and train a diffusion model conditioned on object geometry to predict viable poses. At test time, we sample hand poses and use standard motion planners to select and execute pushing and pulling actions. GSS holds concurrent appointments as a Professor at USC and as an Amazon Scholar. This paper describes work performed at USC and is not associated with Amazon. All authors are with the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, USA.

Personal use of this material is permitted. Abstract--The rapid increase in the development of humanoid robots and customized manufacturing solutions has brought dexterous manipulation to the forefront of modern robotics. Over the past decade, several expensive dexterous hands have come to market, but advances in hardware design, particularly in servo motors and 3D printing, have recently facilitated an explosion of cheaper open-source hands. Most hands are anthropomorphic to allow use of standard human tools, and attempts to increase dexterity often sacrifice anthropomorphism. We introduce the open-source ISyHand (pronounced easy-hand), a highly dexterous, low-cost, easy-to-manufacture, on-joint servo-driven robot hand. Our hand uses off-the-shelf Dynamixel motors, fasteners, and 3D-printed parts, can be assembled within four hours, and has a total material cost of about 1,300 USD. T o demonstrate the utility of the articulated palm, we use reinforcement learning in simulation to train the hand to perform a classical in-hand manipulation task: cube reorientation. Our novel, systematic experiments show that the simulated ISyHand outperforms the two most comparable hands in early training phases, that all three perform similarly well after policy convergence, and that the ISyHand significantly outperforms a fixed-palm version of its own design. Additionally, we deploy a policy trained on cube reorientation on the real hand, demonstrating its ability to perform real-world dexterous manipulation. The dexterity, strength, robustness, and tactile sensing of the human hand are crucial to the human ability to perceive, manipulate, and use objects.

We present Sparsh-skin, a pre-trained encoder for magnetic skin sensors distributed across the fingertips, phalanges, and palm of a dexterous robot hand. Magnetic tactile skins offer a flexible form factor for hand-wide coverage with fast response times, in contrast to vision-based tactile sensors that are restricted to the fingertips and limited by bandwidth. Full hand tactile perception is crucial for robot dexterity. However, a lack of general-purpose models, challenges with interpreting magnetic flux and calibration have limited the adoption of these sensors. Sparsh-skin, given a history of kinematic and tactile sensing across a hand, outputs a latent tactile embedding that can be used in any downstream task. The encoder is self-supervised via self-distillation on a variety of unlabeled hand-object interactions using an Allegro hand sensorized with Xela uSkin. In experiments across several benchmark tasks, from state estimation to policy learning, we find that pretrained Sparsh-skin representations are both sample efficient in learning downstream tasks and improve task performance by over 41% compared to prior work and over 56% compared to end-to-end learning.

-- We introduce the sequential multi-object robotic grasp sampling algorithm SeqGrasp that can robustly synthesize stable grasps on diverse objects using the robotic hand's partial Degrees of Freedom (DoF). We use SeqGrasp to construct the large-scale Allegro Hand sequential grasping dataset SeqDataset and use it for training the diffusion-based sequential grasp generator SeqDiffuser . We experimentally evaluate SeqGrasp and SeqDiffuser against the state-of-the-art non-sequential multi-object grasp generation method Multi-Grasp in simulation and on a real robot. Furthermore, SeqDiffuser is approximately 1000 times faster at generating grasps than SeqGrasp and MultiGrasp. Generation of dexterous grasps has been studied for a long time, both from a technical perspective on generating grasps on robots [1]-[11] and understanding human grasping [12]- [15]. Most of these methods rely on bringing the robotic hand close to the object and then simultaneously enveloping it with all fingers. While this strategy often results in efficient and successful grasp generation, it simplifies dexterous grasping to resemble parallel-jaw grasping, thereby underutilizing the many DoF of multi-fingered robotic hands [10]. In contrast, grasping multiple objects with a robotic hand, particularly in a sequential manner that mirrors human-like dexterity, as shown in Figure 1, is still an unsolved problem. In this work, we introduce SeqGrasp, a novel hand-agnostic algorithm for generating sequential multi-object grasps.

Abstract--Towards the grand challenge of achieving humanlevel manipulation in robots, playing piano is a compelling testbed that requires strategic, precise, and flowing movements. Over the years, several works demonstrated hand-designed controllers on real world piano playing, while other works evaluated robot learning approaches on simulated piano scenarios. In this paper, we develop the first piano playing robotic system that makes use of learning approaches while also being deployed on a real world dexterous robot. Specifically, we make use of Sim2Real to train a policy in simulation using reinforcement learning before deploying the learned policy on a real world dexterous robot. In our experiments, we thoroughly evaluate the interplay between domain randomization and the accuracy of the dynamics model used in simulation. Moreover, we evaluate the robot's performance across multiple songs with varying complexity to study the generalization of our learned policy. Experimental results show that the robot can learn Playing the piano requires humans to master contact-rich to play several simple pieces successfully, after training exclusively hand movements dictated by the timing and tone they intend in simulation. This mastery is not learned quickly but through extensive practice, which requires humans to control their actions based on the haptic and auditory feedback received the natural movements of human hands. This makes it an ideal with each key pressed on the piano. In addition, human hands scenario for exploring Sim2Real transfer, where the objective are an extraordinary research subject due to their unmatched is to train an agent in simulation capable of performing in the dexterity, precision, and adaptability.

We present a framework for learning dexterous in-hand manipulation with multifingered hands using visuomotor diffusion policies. Our system enables complex in-hand manipulation tasks, such as unscrewing a bottle lid with one hand, by leveraging a fast and responsive teleoperation setup for the four-fingered Allegro Hand. We collect high-quality expert demonstrations using an augmented reality (AR) interface that tracks hand movements and applies inverse kinematics and motion retargeting for precise control. The AR headset provides real-time visualization, while gesture controls streamline teleoperation. To enhance policy learning, we introduce a novel demonstration outlier removal approach based on HDBSCAN clustering and the Global-Local Outlier Score from Hierarchies (GLOSH) algorithm, effectively filtering out low-quality demonstrations that could degrade performance. We evaluate our approach extensively in real-world settings and provide all experimental videos on the project website: https://dex-manip.github.io/

Robotic dexterous grasping is a key step toward human-like manipulation. To fully unleash the potential of data-driven models for dexterous grasping, a large-scale, high-quality dataset is essential. While gradient-based optimization offers a promising way for constructing such datasets, existing works suffer from limitations, such as restrictive assumptions in energy design or limited experiments on small object sets. Moreover, the lack of a standard benchmark for comparing synthesis methods and datasets hinders progress in this field. To address these challenges, we develop a highly efficient synthesis system and a comprehensive benchmark with MuJoCo for dexterous grasping. Our system formulates grasp synthesis as a bilevel optimization problem, combining a novel lower-level quadratic programming (QP) with an upper-level gradient descent process. By leveraging recent advances in CUDA-accelerated robotic libraries and GPU-based QP solvers, our system can parallelize thousands of grasps and synthesize over 49 grasps per second on a single NVIDIA 3090 GPU. Our synthesized grasps for Shadow Hand and Allegro Hand achieve a success rate above 75% in MuJoCo, with a penetration depth and contact distance of under 1 mm, outperforming existing baselines on nearly all metrics. Compared to the previous large-scale dataset, DexGraspNet, our dataset significantly improves the performance of learning models, with a simulation success rate from around 40% to 80%. Real-world testing of the trained model on the Shadow Hand achieves an 81% success rate across 20 diverse objects.

Robotic object singulation, where a robot must isolate, grasp, and retrieve a target object in a cluttered environment, is a fundamental challenge in robotic manipulation. This task is difficult due to occlusions and how other objects act as obstacles for manipulation. A robot must also reason about the effect of object-object interactions as it tries to singulate the target. Prior work has explored object singulation in scenarios where there is enough free space to perform relatively long pushes to separate objects, in contrast to when space is tight and objects have little separation from each other. In this paper, we propose the Singulating Objects in Packed Environments (SOPE) framework. We propose a novel method that involves a displacement-based state representation and a multi-phase reinforcement learning procedure that enables singulation using the 16-DOF Allegro Hand. We demonstrate extensive experiments in Isaac Gym simulation, showing the ability of our system to singulate a target object in clutter. We directly transfer the policy trained in simulation to the real world.

Recent advances in AI have led to significant results in robotic learning, including natural language-conditioned planning and efficient optimization of controllers using generative models. However, the interaction data remains the bottleneck for generalization. Getting data for grasping is a critical challenge, as this skill is required to complete many manipulation tasks. Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms optimize a set of solutions to get diverse, high-performing solutions to a given problem. This paper investigates how QD can be combined with priors to speed up the generation of diverse grasps poses in simulation compared to standard 6-DoF grasp sampling schemes. Experiments conducted on 4 grippers with 2-to-5 fingers on standard objects show that QD outperforms commonly used methods by a large margin. Further experiments show that QD optimization automatically finds some efficient priors that are usually hard coded. The deployment of generated grasps on a 2-finger gripper and an Allegro hand shows that the diversity produced maintains sim-to-real transferability. We believe these results to be a significant step toward the generation of large datasets that can lead to robust and generalizing robotic grasping policies.