Authors: Manav Kulshrestha, Apoorva Vashisth, Damon Conover, Aniket Bera
Organizations: Manav Kulshrestha, S. Apoorva Vashisth, and Aniket Bera are with the IDEAS Lab, Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA. · Damon Conover is with the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MD, USA.
Task-Oriented Grasping (TOG) has emerged as an important skill for purposeful robotic manipulation. Given the task of using a knife to "slice bread," a robot must choose to grasp from the handle, whereas for "hand[ing] the knife over," it is preferable for the handle to remain unobstructed for safe handoff. Current approaches for TOG either focus on 2D planar grasping, remain limited by their reliance on task-agnostic grasp generators, or are constrained by reliance on finite, manually-annotated, task-specific grasp datasets that cannot cover all possible grasp-task pairs. To that end, we present TGrasp6D, a vision-language based approach for generating task-oriented 6DoF grasps in a zero-shot manner. Given a task and a single RGB-D image of an associated object, TGrasp6D reasons about the appropriate semantic affordance for the given task and object geometry to produce an initial task- informed prior. This generated prior is further refined via 6DoF pose optimization for collision avoidance while preserving task consistency. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art success rate of 94% on the TaskGrasp dataset, with the best baseline at 74%. We also deploy our approach on a Franka Research 3 robot to demonstrate zero-shot generalization to real world objects
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Example of TGrasp6D producing distinct 6DoF grasps for different tasks on the same real-world object. “handover” task results in grasps that keep the handle clear whereas tasks like “pound” and “cook” that require holding the hammer and pan from the handle are reflected.
Figure 2: Overview of TGrasp6D. Given a single RGB-D observation and a natural-language task instruction, a vision-language model identifies and localizes the task-relevant affordance and predicts an image-space grasp orientation. These cues are lifted into 3D to form a task-informed grasp prior, from which candidate 6DoF grasps are sampled and refined for collision avoidance while preserving task consistency, yielding the final task-oriented grasp.
Method
SR ↑ (%)
GFR ↓ (%)
fOE ↓ (rad)
fPE ↓ (cm)
GCNGrasp [ 14 ]
72.1
3.21
0.72 ±0.35
1.36 ±0.82
GraspGPT [ 20 ]
61.7
20.90
0.86 ±0.38
1.90 ±1.75
GraspMolmo [ 4 ]
65.0
19.94
0.77 ±0.39
1.68 ±1.41
GraspCoT [ 3 ]
7.5
0.00
0.93 ±0.42
4.45 ±2.18
F. Grasp [ 19 ]
73.7
15.43
0.79 ±0.40
1.46 ±0.83
TGrasp6D
94.5
0.00
0.77 ±0.44
1.91 ±1.33
Table I : Comparison with baseline methods. Note that fOE and fPE are reported only for grasps marked as failures. All baseline results use unmodified author-released code and, where available, author-provided pretrained weights; we do not alter any baseline’s inference pipeline.
Figure 3: Qualitative comparison of different 6DoF TOG approaches on objects from the TaskGrasp [ 14 ] dataset. For each method, we show 5 task-oriented grasps per object. Compared to other approaches, our TGrasp6D produces more successful grasps across diverse object types and tasks. For cases like “scoop[ing]” with the “spoon,” most approaches generate feasible grasps. However, performance drops sharply for more challenging cases like doing a “handover” with the “measuring cup.” Of note, compared to the pure vision-language prior (f), grasp-pose refinement (g) appears to visually diversify grasps by generating feasible stable and task-consistent alternates. In some cases, like the “measuring cup,” it even recovers some failures despite noise and missing points due to occlusion in the object point-cloud.
Object
Task
TGrasp6D (Ours)
GraspGPT
F. Grasp
Hammer
pound
10/10
2/10
5/10
handover
10/10
6/10
5/10
Jug
pour
8/10
7/10
4/10
handover
8/10
5/10
7/10
Pan
cook
10/10
6/10
3/10
handover
10/10
3/10
5/10
Table II : Real-robot task-oriented grasping success rate comparison.
Figure 4: Analysis of failure modes, including the effect of grasp refinement for GPT-5.5. Note the y-axis breaks between 4%-10% and 12%-19% to accommodate Gemini-3.7 (11.0%) and Qwen3.5-35B (19.7%) without compressing the smaller values.
VLM
SR (%) ↑
# Tokens Used (×103)
Affordance
Localization
Grasp Axis
GPT 5.5
89.68
0.20±0.16
0.34±0.34
0.61±0.52
Gemini 3.7
84.19
0.78±0.74
1.20±1.32
1.80±1.28
Qwen3.5-35B
75.16
2.12±1.69
1.36±1.60
5.09±2.08
Table III: Pre-pose refinement ablation using other vision-language models for affordance reasoning, localization, and grasp-prior generation.
As robots transition from structured factory settings into homes, they are required to interact with an ever-increasing variety of objects. Many tasks require grasping, and often it is not sufficient to just pick up the target object. Consider a task like "pouring coffee" --- to facilitate the subsequent pouring, the robot should grasp the mug by its handle. Existing learning-based approaches for grasping either find robust and collision-free grasps that are largely agnostic to the task (e.g., picking up the mug by its rim), or leverage foundation models to propose task-appropriate grasp locations that lack fine-grained physical grounding (e.g., reaching for and missing the handle). In this work, we bridge these approaches with a real-to-sim-to-real framework. Based on a single RGB-D observation, we construct a digital twin of the environment, query a large foundation model to propose grasps that align with the object's affordances and task description, and then optimize the proposals to ensure robustness and plausibility before executing the result on the real robot. Our key insight is that the grasp proposals of the foundation model should be regarded as semantic priors that serve as seeds for local, gradient-free optimization. We leverage Bayesian optimization with Thompson sampling to draw batches of nearby poses, which are subsequently evaluated in parallel under domain-randomized physics rollouts. The resulting grasp is both task-oriented and physically feasible for execution by the robot arm. Our full zero-shot real-world transfer only takes a few minutes and improves task-oriented grasping success by up to 33% as compared to other state-of-the-art pipelines. Our code is available here: https://github.com/VT-Collab/GraspTwin/
Daniel J. Evans, Yinlong Dai, Simon Stepputtis +1
Collab, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061. · TEA Lab, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061.
Dexterous grasp synthesis has advanced rapidly in generating stable and physically plausible hand poses, but real-world manipulation requires grasps that preserve the function implied by the task. We study open-vocabulary task-oriented dexterous grasp generation, where a robot must infer functional intent from free-form language, ground it in multi-view visual observations and object geometry, and generate an executable high-degree-of-freedom grasp. We present OpenDexGrasp, a unified data and generative modeling framework for this setting. OpenDexVerse provides dual-source supervision organized by the Coverage-to-Alignment (C2A) Recipe: OpenDex-Scale offers large-scale semantic and geometric coverage through automatic grasp synthesis and vision-language annotation, while OpenDex-Align supplies high-quality embodied alignment through human teleoperation and category-level transfer. OpenDexGrasp learns a shared perception-action latent representation that couples open-vocabulary vision-language context with dexterous action generation. Affordance grounding and grasp generation provide complementary supervision over this latent space, enabling direct generation of task-consistent dexterous grasps without a separate affordance-to-pose inference stage. Extensive simulation and real-robot experiments demonstrate improved functional alignment, physical feasibility, generalization to unseen categories, and real-world execution success. Additional details and videos are available at https://opendexgrasp.github.io/.
Jiyao Zhang, Junhan Wang, Tianyu Wang +4
CFCS, School of CS, PKU, China · National Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing, School of CS, PKU, China · PrimeBot +1
Task-oriented grasping (TOG) is more challenging than simple object grasping because it requires precise identification of object parts and careful selection of grasping areas to ensure effective and robust manipulation. While recent approaches have trained large-scale vision-language models to integrate part-level object segmentation with task-aware grasp planning, their instability in part recognition and grasp inference limits their ability to generalize across diverse objects and tasks. To address this issue, we introduce a novel, geometry-centric strategy for more generalizable TOG that does not rely on semantic features from visual recognition, effectively overcoming the viewpoint sensitivity of model-based approaches. Our main proposals include: 1) an object-part-task ontology for functional part selection based on intuitive human commands, constructed using a Large Language Model (LLM); 2) a sampling-based geometric analysis method for identifying the selected object part from observed point clouds, incorporating multiple point distribution and distance metrics; and 3) a similarity matching framework for imitative grasp planning, utilizing similar known objects with pre-existing segmentation and grasping knowledge as references to guide the planning for unknown targets. We validate the high accuracy of our approach in functional part selection, identification, and grasp generation through real-world experiments. Additionally, we demonstrate the method's generalization capabilities to novel-category objects by extending existing ontological knowledge, showcasing its adaptability to a broad range of objects and tasks.
Hao Chen, Takuya Kiyokawa, Weiwei Wan +1
Graduate School of Engineering Science, The University of Osaka, 1-3, Machikaneyamacho, Toyonaka, Osaka, 560-8531, Japan