Video demos, data, and code are available online.

Dexterous teleoperation plays a crucial role in robotic manipulation for real-world data collection and remote robot control. Previous dexterous teleoperation mostly relies on hand retargeting to closely mimic human hand postures. However, these approaches may fail to fully leverage the inherent dexterity of dexterous hands, which can execute unique actions through their structural advantages compared to human hands. To address this limitation, we propose TypeTele, a type-guided dexterous teleoperation system, which enables dexterous hands to perform actions that are not constrained by human motion patterns. This is achieved by introducing dexterous manipulation types into the teleoperation system, allowing operators to employ appropriate types to complete specific tasks. To support this system, we build an extensible dexterous manipulation type library to cover comprehensive dexterous postures used in manipulation tasks. During teleoperation, we employ a MLLM (Multi-modality Large Language Model)-assisted type retrieval module to identify the most suitable manipulation type based on the specific task and operator commands. Extensive experiments of real-world teleoperation and imitation learning demonstrate that the incorporation of manipulation types significantly takes full advantage of the dexterous robot's ability to perform diverse and complex tasks with higher success rates.

We present PiMForce, a novel framework that enhances hand pressure estimation by leveraging 3D hand posture information to augment forearm surface electromyography (sEMG) signals. Our approach utilizes detailed spatial information from 3D hand poses in conjunction with dynamic muscle activity from sEMG to enable accurate and robust whole-hand pressure measurements under diverse hand-object interactions. We also developed a multimodal data collection system that combines a pressure glove, an sEMG armband, and a markerless finger-tracking module. We created a comprehensive dataset from 21 participants, capturing synchronized data of hand posture, sEMG signals, and exerted hand pressure across various hand postures and hand-object interaction scenarios using our collection system. Our framework enables precise hand pressure estimation in complex and natural interaction scenarios. Our approach substantially mitigates the limitations of traditional sEMG-based or vision-based methods by integrating 3D hand posture information with sEMG signals. Video demos, data, and code are available online.

Without finger function, people with C5-7 spinal cord injury (SCI) regularly utilize wrist extension to passively close the fingers and thumb together for grasping. Wearable assistive grasping devices often focus on this familiar wrist-driven technique to provide additional support and amplify grasp force. Despite recent research advances in modernizing these tools, people with SCI often abandon such wearable assistive devices in the long term. We suspect that the wrist constraints imposed by such devices generate undesirable reach and grasp kinematics. Here we show that using continuous robotic motor assistance to give users more adaptability in their wrist posture prior to wrist-driven grasping reduces task difficulty and perceived exertion. Our results demonstrate that more free wrist mobility allows users to select comfortable and natural postures depending on task needs, which improves the versatility of the assistive grasping device for easier use across different hand poses in the arm's workspace. This behavior holds the potential to improve ease of use and desirability of future device designs through new modes of combining both body-power and robotic automation.

We present HOReeNet, which tackles the novel task of manipulating images involving hands, objects, and their interactions. Especially, we are interested in transferring objects of source images to target images and manipulating 3D hand postures to tightly grasp the transferred objects. Furthermore, the manipulation needs to be reflected in the 2D image space. In our reenactment scenario involving hand-object interactions, 3D reconstruction becomes essential as 3D contact reasoning between hands and objects is required to achieve a tight grasp. At the same time, to obtain high-quality 2D images from 3D space, well-designed 3D-to-2D projection and image refinement are required. Our HOReeNet is the first fully differentiable framework proposed for such a task. On hand-object interaction datasets, we compared our HOReeNet to the conventional image translation algorithms and reenactment algorithm. We demonstrated that our approach could achieved the state-of-the-art on the proposed task.

One of the open challenges in designing robots that operate successfully in the unpredictable human environment is how to make them able to predict what actions they can perform on objects, and what their effects will be, i.e., the ability to perceive object affordances. Since modeling all the possible world interactions is unfeasible, learning from experience is required, posing the challenge of collecting a large amount of experiences (i.e., training data). Typically, a manipulative robot operates on external objects by using its own hands (or similar end-effectors), but in some cases the use of tools may be desirable, nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that while a robot can collect many sensorimotor experiences using its own hands, this cannot happen for all possible human-made tools. Therefore, in this paper we investigate the developmental transition from hand to tool affordances: what sensorimotor skills that a robot has acquired with its bare hands can be employed for tool use? By employing a visual and motor imagination mechanism to represent different hand postures compactly, we propose a probabilistic model to learn hand affordances, and we show how this model can generalize to estimate the affordances of previously unseen tools, ultimately supporting planning, decision-making and tool selection tasks in humanoid robots. We present experimental results with the iCub humanoid robot, and we publicly release the collected sensorimotor data in the form of a hand posture affordances dataset.