Bimanual Manipulation

Coordinated bimanual manipulation is challenging because the motion of either arm can alter the shared 3D scene and thereby affect the other arm. Yet most diffusion policies generate actions without explicitly modeling these future geometric consequences, while predictive variants typically use future state only as auxiliary supervision or fixed conditioning. We address this limitation by proposing JAMB, a diffusion policy that jointly denoises bimanual actions and future 3D point tracks. By allowing action and track hypotheses to evolve together within a shared Transformer, each can inform and refine the other throughout denoising. We further ground multimodal representations in a shared spatiotemporal coordinate system to facilitate geometry-aware interaction during joint denoising. We evaluate JAMB on diverse bimanual manipulation tasks in RoboTwin 2.0 and on a real-world robot, comparing it with action-only policies and alternative future-prediction approaches spanning different state representations and learning objectives. Across 16 simulation tasks, JAMB achieves an average success rate of 83.4%, outperforming the strongest baseline by 23.9 percentage points. On three real-world tasks, it outperforms the action-only and auxiliary geometry prediction methods by 50.0 and 21.2 percentage points, respectively. Beyond these performance gains, JAMB shows stronger generalization to cluttered scenes and out-of-distribution backgrounds than the evaluated baselines. Together, these results demonstrate the effectiveness of our joint action-motion modeling framework for coordinated bimanual manipulation. Our project website is available at https://jam-bimanual.github.io/

Semantically meaningful subtask labels can provide useful contexts for long-horizon policies, but automatically identifying both reliable temporal boundaries and broad semantic descriptions for annotations remains difficult. We present an automatic labelling pipeline that assigns temporal localisation to deterministic trajectory analysis and semantic interpretation to vision-language (VL) reasoning. The pipeline segments synchronised kinematic signals into phases, performs phase-localised VL reasoning to describe the contents, and aggregates the outputs for the base, left arm, and right arm actions. We evaluate this pipeline primarily on 29 real Galaxea bimanual mobile-manipulation tasks. Repeating the VL reasoning three times first produces the same output value for 87.4% on selected tasks. A review by nine participants across all 29 tasks then judgements on the labelled phases and shows positive acceptance of temporal divisions (90.5%), body labels (90.7%), and arm labels (78.7%). The results indicate that the segmentation-VL design can produce structured annotations while preserving asynchronous bimanual behaviour, providing a basis for richer semantic subtask identification and state-based verification.

Underwater visuomotor policy learning has focused primarily on single manipulators, while bimanual imitation learning has been studied largely in air. We present ULOHA, an underwater bimanual robot learning platform that combines custom-designed leader--follower hardware with software extensions to LeRobot, integrating teleoperation, multi-view sensing, demonstration collection, policy training, and autonomous deployment. Real-robot experiments demonstrate a range of coordinated underwater bimanual behaviors, including inter-arm transfer, shared-object manipulation, and buoyancy-driven interception. We evaluate ACT, Diffusion Policy, and the vision--language--action model SmolVLA on the platform. We investigate how learning methods and execution strategies developed for manipulation in air perform underwater, examining bubble disturbances, buoyancy-driven object motion, action-execution horizons, and real-time chunking. A separate single-arm study examines policy transfer between air and water and shows that demonstrations spanning both media support execution in both under the tested conditions. ULOHA provides a unified experimental platform for studying underwater bimanual robot learning under the coupled perceptual and physical effects of underwater environments. Additional material: https://mertcookimg.github.io/uloha/

Force-aware Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies improve contact-rich manipulation, but typically combine task-level motion and contact-dependent adjustment in a single action prediction. Demonstrations provide no explicit labels for decomposing that prediction into a reusable reference action and a correction. We present ForceDelta-VLA, a correction-distillation framework that constructs an explicit force-correction target using paired predictions from a frozen teacher's force-conditioned and learned force-agnostic modes. A separate delay-correction target accounts for reference-action mismatch and the change in reference state. Training uses asynchronous schedule replay with the cached task context available during execution. The resulting lightweight policy adjusts the reference actions using recent force history and robot state, responding to contact changes between reference-action updates without regenerating complete action chunks. Across nine single-arm and bimanual contact-rich tasks, ForceDelta-VLA achieves an 82.2% mean success rate, compared with 54.4% for the original ForceVLA baseline. Direct execution of our Stage-1 Temporal Teacher achieves 70.6%. Relative to ForceVLA, the complete system reduces mean peak contact force over successful trials by approximately 26% on both platforms.

World-action models (WAMs) jointly model future observations and actions, typically predicting the future as RGB images. Other visual modalities such as depth, pretrained visual features, and point tracks can more efficiently capture geometric, semantic, and motion features. However, how best to combine these modalities within WAMs remains an open question. We introduce ModAR, the first WAM to autoregressively denoise multiple future modalities before predicting actions. This allows each prediction to condition on previously generated modalities. We train from scratch to systematically study how training-data mixtures, predicted modalities, and WAM formulations affect performance. In our evaluations, WAMs benefit from predicting point tracks, DINO features, and depth maps, while additionally predicting future RGB does not provide a consistent benefit. We also find that ModAR's sequential generation outperforms existing WAM formulations, with the highest average success rate at all evaluated data scales. We also fine-tune the video-model-initialized WAM Flex-$π$ on the same data; ModAR achieves a slightly higher observed average success rate (75% vs. 72%) while using approximately $20\times$ fewer training FLOPs and no pretraining. On three real-world bimanual tasks, ModAR outperforms baselines and improves with human videos.

This work investigates the control strategies of complex whole-body robot teleoperation that coordinate active perception, bimanual manipulation, and navigation. We developed a hybrid control framework, combining the free-form and constrained control, for the whole-body teleoperation of the TIAGo mobile manipulator. We conducted a user study to explore people's control strategies under different task constraints such as limited time and low tolerance of errors. Our results highlight the effective use of coordinated control in improving task efficiency and reducing the risk of reaching individual joint limits. We discuss our results and their implications for designing future whole-body robot teleoperation systems.

Dexterous manipulation requires coordinated multi-finger control and effective tactile feedback, yet learning these capabilities remains challenging due to the lack of large-scale real-world data and the difficulty of extracting effective representations from sparse tactile signals. We build a robot platform and teleoperation system to collect a 200-hour bimanual dexterous manipulation dataset with synchronized visual, tactile, and language annotations, comprising 10,576 trajectories across 65 tasks, 69.5% of which involve dexterous multi-finger manipulation. We further propose STAR, an integrated training recipe for vision-tactile-language-action (VTLA) models that addresses the spatial, temporal, and informational sparsity of tactile signals through visual-tactile joint pre-training, sparse-global tactile token representation, and sparse future tactile prediction. Trained on this dataset, STAR achieves a 61% average success rate across four real-world tasks with 100 post-training trajectories per task, demonstrating dexterous performance under task-specific post-training.

Bimanual manipulation policies require large and diverse training datasets, yet collecting demonstrations on physical robots is expensive and difficult to scale. Simulation can generate data efficiently, but existing pipelines typically operate within closed asset libraries and predefined scenes: adding a newly observed object or environment still requires substantial effort to reconstruct geometry, specify physical and semantic properties, annotate interactions, and integrate the result into executable tasks. We present RoboCousin, an extensible simulation-based data-generation platform that turns user-provided observations into reusable assets, scenes, and expert trajectories for bimanual manipulation. Built on RoboTwin~2.0, RoboCousin converts object images into simulation-ready assets with visual and collision geometry, semantic and physical metadata, and automatically generated grasp-contact candidates. It further constructs digital cousins that vary compatible objects, backgrounds, layouts, and language instructions while preserving task-relevant affordances and spatial relations. The same asset system supports tabletop and room-level scene construction, with collision-aware base control for interaction beyond a fixed workspace. We release RoboCousin-OBD, containing more than 3,000 annotated object instances and 50 background environments, and use RoboCousin to generate over one million expert trajectories across 50 tasks. Simulation and real-robot experiments show that the automatically generated interaction annotations are comparable to curated annotations, generated assets provide effective sim-to-real supervision, and tabletop cousins can improve transfer beyond training on a single reconstructed scene. RoboCousin therefore provides a practical path for expanding both the scale and coverage of synthetic bimanual manipulation data.

Learning generalist policies for robust bimanual manipulation is bottlenecked by the scarcity of high quality large scale human demonstration data. In this work, we release 1,500 hours of diverse bimanual manipulation demonstrations covering everyday household tasks, and use this comprehensive corpus to train XR-2, a powerful vision-language-action (VLA) model. Enabled by a purpose built high throughput data pipeline and a carefully designed multi stage training paradigm, XR-2 attains strong manipulation performance in our systematic experiments while retaining favorable training efficiency and high data utilization. We further study two critical scaling axes: varying the amount of expert demonstration data, and post training on DAgger correction data from real time human interventions. In both settings, task success rate improves steadily over the data ranges we probe, exhibiting a clear consistent scaling trend at our current data scale. These results validate both the learning capacity of XR-2 and the promising scaling properties of the released dataset, which we open source to support reproducible research on bimanual robot manipulation learning.

Bimanual dexterous grasping of large objects is a critical challenge in robotic manipulation. However, most existing studies focus on sequential manipulation rather than cooperative grasping, and methods addressing such bimanual tasks have largely been limited to simulation. These limitations stem from the difficulty of acquiring full 3D object models and generating physically plausible grasping actions. To fill this gap, we propose a real-world bimanual grasping framework that includes: a multimodal dataset capturing joint angles, visual observations and force signals; a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM)-based module that generates joint-level grasp configurations from segmented point clouds; and an execution strategy that integrates motion planning with online grasp refinement to ensure physical stability and feasibility. Our approach enables the synthesis of executable bimanual grasps from single-view inputs, reducing dependence on complete 3D object models and ensuring stable real-world performance. Experiments on a dual-arm robot demonstrate high success rates across unseen objects with varying geometries and poses, and ablation studies confirm the contributions of key components of our system.

Recent world-action models (WAMs) show that co-training policies with future prediction can provide physical priors for action generation. Building on the future-prediction ability of video models, many WAMs generate future videos and recover actions with inverse-dynamics models, or use these predicted videos as goal conditions for action generation. In both cases, the world model is trained mostly on successful demonstrations and has little reason to predict the consequences of bad actions. We introduce FACT, a causal World-Action Model that predicts future video and task progress conditioned on the executed action. This action-conditioned interface allows failure rollouts to supervise action consequences, turning bad actions into valid future targets rather than being discarded. Failure-aware training makes the progress predictor aware of both successful and failed action outcomes, which can optionally be used to score sampled action candidates at inference. Extensive experiments on simulation and real-world bimanual manipulation tasks show that FACT outperforms many existing baselines, improves as failure data are incorporated into training, and reduces success-biased future hallucination under bad actions. See more details at https://fact-wam.github.io/

Subtask labels decompose a long-horizon manipulation demonstration into shorter semantic segments for policy training and evaluation. Natural language descriptions are easy to read, but their linguistic variability makes automatic verification difficult. Rigid template formats, such as BEHAVIOR-1K's skill_annotation, are linguistically over-segmented, hindering both readability and annotation consistency. We propose the Structured Subtask Chain (SSC), a state-transition representation that bridges these extremes. A demonstration is a sequence of Structured Subtask Template (SST) entries. Each SST stores core action components (subject, predicate, object), flexible conditions (adverbial modifiers such as spatial or instrumental phrases), a base-motion field separate from arm actions, and an after-state scene graph. Built on this format, SSC supports three vision-language assisted functions: rendering SSTs as natural language, checking the assembled chain against four state-transition rules, and completing underspecified fields through a query resolution cascade. We instantiate the pipeline on BEHAVIOR-1K (50 tasks, 3 episodes per task, 2,357 annotated action cells) for logic verification and content completion, evaluating 13 selected state-of-the-art VL models as candidate verifiers and reporting labelling anomalies.

Bimanual manipulation policies trained with imitation learning are typically evaluated on workstation or datacenter-class GPUs, leaving the cost of deploying them on embedded hardware largely uncharacterized. We present a bimanual SO-101 system running entirely on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super (8 GB), the entry-level tier of NVIDIA's embedded line, using a desktop GPU (RTX 3070) only for offline training, evaluated on pick-and-place of a deformable beanbag. First, we build a GStreamer capture pipeline backed by NVMM buffers that removes redundant host-device copies from three-camera sensing. Contrary to expectation, the conventional path fit the memory budget and dropped no frames; what zero-copy sensing recovers is CPU headroom (peak single-core utilization 98.0% to 77.0%) and worst-case latency (117.31 ms to 101.52 ms). Second, we train ACT and Diffusion Policy on identical demonstrations, each at its own reference budget (100k gradient steps for ACT, 200k for Diffusion Policy). ACT converges to a task-competent policy (19/20 trials) while Diffusion Policy does not converge to a usable one (0/10) even at twice the step count, which we attribute to differing convergence costs rather than an accuracy ceiling. Third, we convert ACT to TensorRT. FP16 reduces mean inference latency from 114.02 ms to 17.93 ms (6.4x) and INT8 to 12.65 ms (9.0x), with task success preserved at all three precisions (19/20, 18/20, 19/20). We report two findings not previously documented for ACT: TensorRT's general-purpose INT8 calibration quantizes the ResNet18 backbone but accepts zero of 145 transformer layers, explaining INT8's negligible size reduction over FP16 (0.9%) despite a further 28% latency gain; and the need for quantization is conditional on ACT's action-chunking configuration, feasible in full precision at n_action_steps = 100 but not at the per-step re-prediction temporal ensembling requires.

In robot teleoperation, haptic feedback can be used to help human operators accomplish dexterous manipulation tasks. However, existing haptic feedback methods try to replicate high-fidelity sensory haptics that are felt in real world interactions, which are constrained by the sensing and feedback hardware capability and may lead to higher workload. To addresses these limitations, this work introduces semantic haptics for teleoperation, which uses abstract haptic patterns to convey critical information about robot states. We categorize robot states into "Confirmations" and "Exceptions", implement a modular haptic rendering pipeline in robot simulation, and deliver semantic haptic feedback to operators through pneumatic and vibrotactile wristbands. This simplifies hardware requirements and enables one-to-many mappings between haptic patterns and robot states. Through three evaluation studies, we identify the most effective semantic haptic design for a common pick and place teleoperation task and compare semantic haptics to other teleoperation feedback approaches including sensory haptics and visual feedback. Results suggest that while semantic haptics performs similarly as other feedback in unimanual tasks, it achieves superior performance in bimanual tasks, with reduced task workload, increased situational awareness, and overall preference.

World Action Models (WAMs) augment robot policies with action-conditioned predicted futures, but a plausible future alone does not justify changing the action that a bimanual policy would execute. We present CoWAM, a selective intervention layer that expresses synchronization, role compatibility, and collision convergence as coordination contracts. Each contract combines typed admissibility checks with event-conditioned verification and calibrated intervention gates. CoWAM preserves the nominal action unless an alternative satisfies every active obligation and provides a clear, low-risk improvement; when the nominal action is also inadmissible, it invokes a predefined abstention fallback. To separate selector quality from proposal quality, all methods operate on identical candidate pools and commit their decisions before shared oracle labeling. Across eight simulated bimanual tasks, CoWAM improves coordination-valid selection by 16.7 percentage points over the contract-only variant and raises closed-loop success by 9.6 percentage points over the strongest selective baseline, while keeping harmful interventions below 1%. Together, these results establish coordination contracts as an effective interface for conservative policy intervention with predicted world-action evidence across coordination-rich bimanual tasks.

Mobile manipulation is a key capability for embodied intelligence, enabling robots to accomplish complex multi-stage tasks in open-world environments. However, mobile manipulation poses two key challenges for vision-language-action (VLA) policies: At the data level, the efficient collection of high-quality whole-body demonstrations demands the coordinated control of both the mobile base and the robotic arms; at the model level, existing VLA models predominantly rely on local camera observations, whose limited field of view hinders global spatial understanding. To address these challenges, we develop a whole-body teleoperation system and a panoramic-aware VLA policy. The system enables coordinated control of a wheeled bimanual robot through a single VR interface and supports the acquisition of a real-world mobile manipulation dataset comprising 5.5 hours of multimodal demonstrations. Building upon this dataset, we propose PanoVLA, a panorama-aware vision-language-action policy for mobile bimanual manipulation. Built upon a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture, PanoVLA introduces global spatial context through dedicated panorama encoding and fusion modules, enabling effective integration of panoramic observations with language instructions and robot states for action generation. Evaluation on four real-world mobile manipulation tasks demonstrates that PanoVLA achieves an average stage completion rate of 91.3% and an end-to-end success rate of 73.4%, substantially outperforming local-view baselines. These results demonstrate that incorporating panoramic spatial context improves spatial understanding and closed-loop manipulation performance in mobile robots.

Visuomotor imitation learning has demonstrated success for manipulation tasks. However, the trained policies remain brittle to visual nuisances', with even minor task-preserving variations such as lighting, distractions or changes in colour result in heavy degradation of the trained policy's performance. While increasing data diversity can improve robustness, it is unclear which additional demonstrations are informative for a particular trained policy. We propose Counterfactual Nuisance Behaviour Cloning (CFNBC), an offline data-selection framework for targeted robustness repair. Starting from a nominal policy trained on clean' demonstrations, CFNBC generates paired clean and nuisance observations that preserve the expert action, then measures \emph{action drift}: the change in the policy's predicted action under a nuisance that should not alter the desired behaviour. This provides a policy-specific sensitivity signal for selecting a compact, response-diverse repair set from a larger candidate pool, without requiring rollout success labels or online policy execution. We show in MuJoCo bimanual cube transfer and SimplerEnv cube stacking that action drift correlates with nuisance-induced failure, and that response-guided repair with only $20$--$30$ selected candidates substantially outperforms matched-budget random selection while approaching the performance of much larger random repair budgets. These results support a data-centric view of robustness repair: the most useful data are not necessarily the most numerous, visually diverse, or obviously difficult, but the examples that cover fragile response modes of the current policy.

Multi-stream robot manipulation policies achieve unparalleled sample efficiency and generalization by modeling actions relative to environmental reference frames. However, existing approaches typically assume these frames to be strictly exogenous. This causal assumption collapses in dynamic settings, such as when a single robot arm manipulates a moving object or when two arms coordinate, where each arm effectively becomes part of the dynamic environment of the other. We propose DynaMAC, a lightweight, policy-agnostic framework that resolves this causal limitation while preserving the sample efficiency, computational speed, and flexibility of multi-stream policies, DynaMAC treats the opposite arm as a dynamic task parameter, thereby providing a unified formulation for dynamic manipulation and bimanual coordination without requiring an explicit leader-follower relationship. To rigorously evaluate these capabilities, we introduce DynaBench, a novel benchmark for robot manipulation in dynamic environments. Across both dynamic environments and bimanual manipulation tasks, DynaMAC outperforms leading probabilistic and generative baselines by over 35 percentage points while requiring 20 times fewer samples. Crucially, DynaMAC generalizes zero-shot from static demonstrations to dynamic environments, substantially simplifying data collection and establishing an elegant bridge toward human-robot collaboration.

Bimanual object reorientation - picking an object, handing it over between two arms, and placing it in a desired target pose - is valuable when direct placement from the initial grasp is infeasible due to collisions, kinematic constraints, or poor final orientation. However, achieving this under multiple competing objectives remains challenging. We introduce BiCompoDiff, a compositional diffusion and energy-based framework that jointly optimizes grasp selection, handover, regrasp, and motion planning under multiple constraints. By combining a pretrained grasp diffusion model with bimanual planning energy-based models (EBMs), our method injects gradient guidance during reverse diffusion to enforce collision avoidance, trajectory smoothness (via differentiable inverse kinematics), handover feasibility, and regrasp safety. Annealed MCMC sampling further refines grasp poses over the composite energy landscape. Experiments across diverse simulated household reorientation tasks demonstrate that BiCompoDiff achieves over 20% higher success rates and up to 37% smoother trajectories (measured by joint displacement) compared to strong sampling-based baselines. Real-world validation confirms effective sim-to-real transfer and robust performance on challenging scenes.

Existing teleoperation systems are often tailored to specific robot hardware and task domains, limiting their scalability and adaptability. We present ModPack, a modular and extensible teleoperation system designed to support diverse robot embodiments and task requirements within a unified framework. At the core of ModPack is a self-contained wearable "backpack" that integrates onboard computation, power, communication, and data storage. Built on top of this shared interface, the system supports plug-and-play capability modules including joint-level teleoperation with haptic feedback, mobile manipulation, and active perception. Experiments across two distinct robot platforms and real-world mobile manipulation tasks demonstrate that ModPack provides a flexible and reusable framework for data collection and policy learning. To support future research, we open-source the complete hardware design and software stack. Project website: https://modpack-robotics.github.io/

Robotic manipulation is inherently multi-frame: local actions may be simple in an end-effector frame, while transport, upright-object handling, and whole-body coordination are better represented in a base-aligned frame. However, modern diffusion-based visuomotor policies typically commit to a single predefined action frame, forcing one denoiser to model action distributions that are often unnecessarily complex in that frame. We propose Mixture of Frames Policy (MoF), a diffusion policy that performs synchronized action denoising across multiple coordinate frames. MoF maintains a single canonical diffusion state, re-expresses it in several task-relevant frames, applies frame-specialized denoisers, and fuses their noise predictions back in the canonical frame. To make this possible for intermediate noisy diffusion states, we introduce a column-based 6D rotation representation within an SE(3) action parameterization that supports exact, differentiable frame transformations without requiring noisy rotations to lie on the SO(3) manifold. Across nine simulated bimanual manipulation tasks, we show that the best action frame is task-dependent and that MoF improves over oracle frame selection and standard Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) baselines. We further evaluate MoF on two real-world bimanual mobile manipulation tasks, demonstrating that it outperforms all constituent single-frame baselines. Project homepage: https://mofpo.github.io

Vision Language Action (VLA) models unify visual perception, natural-language understanding, and action generation within a single foundation model, allowing a robot to follow instructions such as fold the towel or fly to the red building directly from camera images. Because VLAs inherit world knowledge from internet-scale pre-training, they have become the dominant framework for learning-based manipulation, with bimanual coordination serving as the most demanding testbed: two arms with 7 degrees of freedom each must move in concert to fold, assemble, and reorient objects. Unmanned aerial robotics faces a structurally similar challenge: a drone must coordinate thrust, attitude, and increasingly gripper commands from visual observations under strict latency and payload constraints. This review covers 183 contributions spanning 2017-2026 and organized along seven dimensions: VLA architectures, training recipes, action representations, bimanual coordination (2022-2026), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation and control (2017-2026), language grounding, and cross-cutting concerns including memory and world models. We show that the coordination strategies, training recipes, and action representations developed for bimanual VLAs transfer to unmanned aerial systems and identify fourteen research directions across both domains.

Most quadruped loco-manipulation designs trade manipulation capability against stance. A trunk-mounted arm sits high and usually carries a single arm; using the legs as manipulators lifts the manipulating leg off the ground; and even leg-mounted grippers reach two-handed tasks only by rearing onto the hind legs. This paper integrates a manipulator with a prismatic slider, two revolute joints, and a gripper into each front calf of a Unitree Go2. The two arms grasp objects at ground level and manipulate with both hands while all four feet stay planted, without rearing. With one arm carrying, the base stays free to walk. A vision-language model sequences skills from a predefined library at each skill boundary, conditioned on the head-camera image and task state, for long-horizon autonomy. In simulation, the design performs three bimanual tasks: a long-horizon cabinet task under autonomous skill selection, a cooperative two-handed lift, and an inter-arm handover.

Robotic manipulation often requires identifying functional parts, such as a mug handle or a hammer head. However, features attached to observed 3D points can vary with viewpoint and sensor noise, giving a policy inconsistent representations of the same part. We propose an object-centric semantic field to provide more consistent part-aware features for manipulation. We use the observed object cloud to build a continuous field, then read features from this field at 3D locations independently resampled from the cloud. Each feature uses the sampled object support as context, rather than directly reusing an individual point descriptor. Part classification distinguishes functional regions, cross-instance alignment brings corresponding part features together, and perturbation consistency encourages similar features under observation changes. The queried coordinates and features form semantic point clouds that are supplied to a DP3-based policy. We evaluate the approach on four RoboTwin simulation tasks and four real-world bimanual tasks, achieving average success rates of 69.3% and 67.5%, respectively. These improve on Utonia Point-wise by 7.0 and 32.5 percentage points, respectively, with real-world tests on held-out objects. A point-wise control with matched part supervision scores 63.5% in simulation, compared with our 69.3%. These results highlight the value of stable, object-conditioned semantic fields for manipulation across object instances and varying observations. Project Page: \href{https://zainzh.github.io/beyond-point-attached-semantics}{https://zainzh.github.io/beyond-point-attached-semantics}.

Foundation models give robots powerful high-level reasoning, yet turning that intelligence into reliable physical action remains difficult: roboticists must still align device drivers, network interfaces, sensors, controllers, and safety constraints for each platform. This often-overlooked integration layer acts as the robot's spinal cord, translating high-level intent into coordinated physical behavior, and remains a primary bottleneck for scalable Embodied AI. Hence, we propose SPINE (Scalable Physical Integration with ageNtic Expertise), an agentic framework for systematically debugging and deploying bimanual robots for teleoperation. SPINE centers on two subagent-driven workflows: a profile builder that compiles robot-specific context and a debugger that uses that context to iterate through diagnosis, repair, and validation until teleoperation succeeds. Across two bimanual robot platforms and 12 debugging scenarios, novice-operated SPINE achieved more complete and efficient recovery than human operators using Claude Code. On DOBOT X-Trainer, SPINE improved success from 76% to 100% and reduced mean time-to-teleoperation by 30%; on AgileX PiPER, SPINE also achieved 100% success and reduced mean time-to-teleoperation by 38%. These results show that structured agentic debugging can address a key cyber-physical integration bottleneck in real-world robot deployment.

This paper presents KYON, a hybrid wheel-legged quadruped robot equipped with a bimanual upper body for loco-manipulation tasks. The platform features a semi-modular design with a reconfigurable lower legs, enabling both wheeled and legged locomotion depending on the environment. A design approach that places actuators in the base and uses transmission mechanisms reduces distal inertia, improving agility and dynamic performance. The robot integrates a whole-body control framework together with a reinforcement learning based policy to handle nonlinear dynamics and enhance robustness to disturbances for the execution of locomotion and manipulation tasks, independently. Experimental results demonstrate effective dynamic locomotion and bimanual manipulation, validating the platform's capability to operate in complex and unstructured scenarios.

Bimanual manipulation is essential for advanced robotic systems because it offers higher efficiency and flexibility compared to single-arm configurations. However, existing approaches either lack inter-arm interaction or ignore the need for a dynamic division of labor, treating the arms as functionally equivalent. To address these limitations, this paper draws inspiration from human bimanual manipulation where one arm handles core operations and the other provides auxiliary support, and proposes PA-BiCoop, a new single-model bimanual cooperation framework with dynamic primary-auxiliary arm differentiation. PA-BiCoop categorizes robotic arms into primary and auxiliary arms with adaptively adjustable roles across task stages, employs two specialized decoders that share a global feature encoder: the primary decoder generates the primary arm's base-coordinate pose and core-task affordance heatmaps, and the auxiliary decoder outputs the auxiliary arm's relative pose in the primary arm's coordinate system. Moreover, we design a dynamic role assignment module to automatically map roles to left/right arms without manual pre-definition. This design facilitates inter-arm knowledge sharing and coordinated manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PA-BiCoop achieves superior performance: it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 48% on average in RLBench2 simulation tasks and by over 50% on average in real world tasks, thereby verifying its effectiveness and advancement in bimanual manipulation.

We study whether we can learn novel manipulation skills from human actions to a bi-manual robot with parallel grippers. Human action data is cheap, abundant, and diverse, making it one of the most promising resources for scaling up robot learning. Yet transferring skills from humans to robots remains hard: most prior work treats humans as just another bi-manual 6DoF embodiment, where hand-pose estimates are noisy and the contact patterns of human fingers differ fundamentally from those of a parallel gripper. We argue that learning rotation-inclusive action signals from human data is therefore sub-optimal, and instead propose a bridging action representation: the relative wrist translation within the initial head-camera frame, an action space shared by humans and robots. To handle the potential absence of certain action components in different embodiments, we build a $π_0$-like vision-language-action model with interleaved action tokens and attention masking. On a suite of novel bi-manual manipulation tasks, our bridging action transfers human manipulation knowledge to robots far more effectively than noisy 6DoF human actions and scales with the amount of human data.

Assistive robotic systems face a fundamental trade-off: fully autonomous systems lack user agency, while fully user-controlled systems demand continuous cognitive effort. Existing shared autonomy approaches blend human and robot commands but are mostly deployed in separate physical bodies. We introduce co-embodiment with variable autonomy, where human and robot share a single physical body and operate at different autonomy levels across task phases, from mutual autonomy during object search and grasping to human-dominant control during actuation. We present a co-embodied, wearable robotic hand that has its own mind'' and operates with variable autonomy levels. A learning-from-demonstration visuomotor diffusion policy enables autonomous grasping when the user positions the hand near known objects. Once grasped, the system signals completion and the human can actuate the grasped tool (drill, spray bottle, infrared thermometer, lighter, and ice-cream scoop) via hands-free head gestures. The human retains veto authority at all times through a release gesture that returns the system to the initial phase. Unlike blended autonomy, where control is continuously negotiated, our co-embodied approach consists of variable autonomy from full human control to full independent actions while maintaining physical coupling, realizing a one body, two minds paradigm. In a user study with 44 participants performing five bimanual tasks, users rapidly adapted to this two minds'' paradigm: completion times improved by 23.3% across trials ($p < 0.001$, Cohen's $d = 0.94$), the best-performing policy variant reached a 93.6% task success rate, and acceptance ratings were high (5.70/7 overall impression, 5.52/7 daily use willingness). This work establishes co-embodiment with variable autonomy as a viable approach for assistive robotics, enabling human-robot collaboration through co-embodiment.

A key bottleneck in training generalist policies for bimanual dexterous manipulation is the lack of large-scale, high-quality datasets. Synthetic data generation in simulation provides a scalable alternative to human video demonstrations by overcoming challenges such as morphology mismatch, missing physical interactions, and the generation of robot actions. However, existing approaches based on human teleoperation offer limited task diversity, as object-centric trajectory matching often neglects the feasibility of robot execution. Reinforcement learning (RL) enables broader scalability but is often constrained by handcrafted, task-specific rewards. In this work, we propose a systematic RL-based data generation pipeline that integrates generalizable reward design, effective domain randomization, and language-conditioned task annotations. This pipeline synthesizes diverse, high-quality datasets for dexterous bimanual manipulation and enables training of language-conditioned multi-task policies. Our experiments show that the generated data significantly improves generalization across three representative manipulation tasks.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models show strong capabilities in single and dual-arm robotic manipulation. Prior works show coordinated bimanual behaviors can emerge from end-to-end learning, leveraging large vision-language backbones with continuous action prediction. However, as bimanual tasks become tightly coupled and execution constraints become critical, implicit coordination alone is insufficient to ensure reliable, interpretable, and stable behavior. In this work, we propose Co-VLA, a coordination-aware bimanual manipulation framework introducing explicit structural priors into VLA models. We instantiate our method on a state-of-the-art vision-language backbone by replacing its monolithic action head with a Structured Action Expert (SAE) designed for bimanual coordination. Specifically, we introduce explicit structure at the action generation level with a modular coordination-aware loss that shapes shared and residual latents according to task-specific structures. The shared latent encodes task-level coordination intent, while residual latents capture execution adjustments for each arm. At deployment, a Latent-Aware Controller (LAC) interprets the learned representations to modulate synchronization strength, execution asymmetry, smoothness, and safety constraints in real time. LAC operates at the joint-command level and remains compatible with standard control pipelines without requiring force or impedance control. Experiments across simulation and real-world benchmarks show Co-VLA significantly outperforms monolithic baselines, achieving a 27% success rate gain in tight-coordination tasks, more than doubling performance in OOD real-world scenarios (from 13% to 27%), and reducing task completion time by up to 25%.

Dual-arm manipulation can improve throughput via parallel execution, but collecting bimanual demonstrations for training is costly and difficult. We present ExS2D, a hierarchical action expansion framework that enables dual-arm manipulation from single-arm supervision. ExS2D first generates structured subtasks from textual instructions while explicitly capturing temporal precedence. It then grounds each subtask into executable actions through subtask-guided action mapping in observation. Finally, precedence-aware action allocation and synchronized planning are performed by a multimodal large language model driven coordinator to select collision-free dual-arm executions. Simulation experiments demonstrate that ExS2D reduces the average execution steps by 54.4% while maintaining a comparable success rate to a single-arm baseline. Real-robot experiments on four tasks further demonstrate the reliability of ExS2D for dual-arm execution under few-shot single-arm samples, while using zero bimanual demonstrations.

In bimanual robotic manipulation, task-relevant visual information varies with the task stage and context, while the interaction of the two arms shifts between independent and coordinated modes, making policy learning challenging. However, existing monolithic VLA policies typically process multi-view observations and distinct bimanual interaction patterns without explicitly adapting their visual conditioning or action-generation structure. To address this issue, we propose a bimanual manipulation VLA framework based on Dual-Level Structural Decomposition. The View-Selective Visual Router dynamically adjusts wrist-view contributions to emphasize relevant visual cues, while the Interaction-Aware Action Mixture-of-Experts decomposes action generation into coordinated and arm-wise pathways to adapt to varying bimanual interaction modes. We evaluate the proposed method on six simulated bimanual manipulation tasks in RoboTwin 2.0 and three long-horizon real-world tasks. Our model improves the overall average success rate over a monolithic baseline by 27.7% in simulation and 43.3% in real-world evaluation, while consistently outperforming single-module variants across both settings. These results demonstrate that jointly considering selective visual processing and explicit decomposition of bimanual interaction structures provides an effective inductive bias for robust bimanual manipulation.

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/

Assistive mobility and manipulation platforms have received increasing attention as a means of restoring independence to individuals with disabilities. While effective for many basic activities of daily living (ADLs), a significant percentage of everyday tasks such as opening a jar, pouring a liquid, lifting a tray, or basic meal preparation, is fundamentally bimanual and remains out of reach for any single-arm system. Adding a second arm to a wheelchair is impractical, due to the additional power draw, cost, and the loss of space required for transfers and mobility. We instead propose a heterogeneous, on-demand bimanual system, in which a wheelchair-mounted anchor arm is joined when needed by a summoned mobile manipulator that serves as a complement arm. The central technical problem, which we call bimanual joining, is conditional: the anchor has already committed to a grasp, and the complement arm must choose where to stand and what to grasp to complete the task. We formulate bimanual joining as a three-phase decomposition (plan, drive, grasp) and show that a vision-language model (VLM), coupled with standard geometric tools, provides task-level knowledge sufficient to solve a representative class of bimanual ADLs. Our system JOIN, contributes (i) a wheelchair-referenced opposition score, and (ii) task-conditioned directional manipulability. We evaluate JOIN on a Kinova Gen3 anchor and a Hello Robot Stretch~3 complement on representative same-object and different-object tasks. JOIN accomplished more attempts (19/20) than state-of-the-art methods (14/20) and required markedly less correction by the operator.

Robotic manipulation has been widely applied in industrial scenarios. Compared with single-arm manipulation, bimanual manipulation is equipped with multiple cameras to capture information from different viewpoints. However, existing multi-view policies encode each view independently or fuse view features shallowly, resulting in limited sharing semantic perception and unreliable spatial awareness. In this paper, we propose \textbf{MV-Actor}, a multi-view perception framework that builds a unified semantic-spatial representation for bimanual manipulation. First, MV-Actor performs Multi-view Semantic Interaction to share semantic perception across views. Then it uses Semantic-Spatial Token Interaction to ground visual semantics with feed-forward reconstruction model features and acquire reliable spatial awareness. Finally, a Guided Metric Depth Repair module refines degraded sensor depth to provide more reliable metric anchors under consumer-grade depth noise. In simulation experiments conducted on the PerAct2 bimanual benchmark, MV-Actor achieves a state-of-the-art average success rate of 87.8%. In real-world evaluations with more frequent viewpoint changes and unstable consumer-grade depth, MV-Actor outperforms both RGB and RGB-D baselines, further demonstrating the benefit of sharing semantic perception and reliable spatial awareness for bimanual 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.

Robotic manipulation of textiles remains challenging because continuous deformation and self-occlusions hinder the robust visual perception required to estimate the cloth's state. To address the lack of annotated real-world data, we developed a Blender-based synthetic pipeline exporting auto-annotated keypoints, and combined manually labeled renders with real-world data to train a wrinkle detector. We present a perception framework integrating a CNN for permutation-invariant keypoint detection and a YOLOv8-OpenCV pipeline to extract grasping points from structural wrinkles. A proposed bimanual algorithm uses this system to stretch fully folded garments via wrinkles, transitioning to keypoint-based ironing once corners emerge. The keypoint model achieves a Mean Position Error (MPE) of 1.7615 pixels. The perception system transfers to physical fabrics without fine-tuning, outperforming baselines that fail in high-occlusion states or yield false positives on severe folds.

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.

Bimanual coordination is essential for many real-world manipulation tasks, yet learning bimanual robot policies is limited by the scarcity of bimanual robots and datasets. Single-arm robots, however, are widely available in research labs. Can we leverage them to train bimanual robot policies? We present MonoDuo, a framework for learning bimanual manipulation policies using single-arm robot demonstrations paired with human collaboration. MonoDuo collects data by teleoperating a single-arm robot to perform one side of a bimanual task while a human performs the other, then swapping roles to cover both sides. RGB-D observations from a wrist-mounted and fixed camera are augmented into synthetic demonstrations for target bimanual robots using state-of-the-art hand pose estimation, image and point cloud segmentation, and inpainting. These synthetic demonstrations, grounded in real robot kinematics, are used to train bimanual policies. We evaluate MonoDuo on five tasks: box lifting, backpack packing, cloth folding, jacket zipping, and plate handover. Compared to approaches relying solely on human bimanual videos, MonoDuo enables zero-shot deployment on unseen bimanual robot configurations, achieving success rates up to 70%. With only 25 target robot demonstrations, few-shot finetuning further boosts success rates by 65-70% over training from scratch, demonstrating MonoDuo's effectiveness in efficiently transferring knowledge from single-arm robot data to bimanual robot policies.

Behavior cloning for contact-rich bimanual manipulation remains challenging because diverse demonstrations are expensive to collect, and even small disturbances can push the system into off-manifold states where no recovery supervision is available. We propose PGDG, a data generation framework with zero-shot curation that expands a single demonstration into a compact dataset of physically plausible, successful, and diverse recovery behaviors without additional human labeling. PGDG iterates between a physics-grounded sampler and a dataset curator, where the curator selects informative, non-redundant, and recoverable behaviors to update the sampling distribution toward under-covered recovery modes, and the sampler draws physically plausible rollout candidates from this updated distribution and retains successful trajectories. To further improve data quality, PGDG applies short-horizon sampling-based control to relabel selected risky states with corrective actions. Across four bimanual manipulation tasks, PGDG consistently outperforms spatial-only augmentation in both simulation and zero-shot real-world transfer. On RotateBox-Pitch, success improves from 38% to 93% in simulation and from 35% to 82% in the real world. PGDG also enables effective foundation models fine-tuning such as GR00T, increasing success from 46% to 77%. Additional results are available in our website: https://cunxid.github.io/PGDG/.

Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs) such as ropes and cables are widely encountered in both household and industrial applications, yet remain challenging to manipulate due to their infinite-dimensional configuration space and frequent self-occlusion. Imitation learning from teleoperation offers a practical path to bimanual DLO manipulation, but its scalability is limited by human effort, making the choice of observation space critical for generalization from small datasets. In this study, we investigate whether the lack of generalization in egocentric visual policies for the knot-untangling task stems from the observation space itself, rather than from the policy architecture or data scale. We compare two Action Chunking with Transformers policies trained on the same bimanual teleoperation data: a vision-based policy conditioned on two egocentric RGB streams from wrist-mounted cameras, and a state-based policy conditioned on the DLO's 3D particle state, extracted from an initial observation via multi-view fusion and evolved in a particle-based eXtended Position-Based Dynamics simulation. Evaluated open-loop on an unseen rope configuration, the state-based policy outperforms its visual counterpart with a 30.8% reduction in L1 error when predicting the initial grasp-and-pull action, quantifying the observability gap between pixels and physics-consistent state, and pointing toward more data-efficient robot learning for the DLO manipulation task from limited human demonstrations.

Recent advances in visuomotor policy learning have enabled robots to perform control directly from visual inputs. Yet, extending such end-to-end learning from single-arm to bimanual manipulation remains challenging due to the need for both independent perception and coordinated interaction between arms. Existing methods typically favor one side -- either decoupling the two arms to avoid interference or enforcing strong cross-arm coupling for coordination -- thus lacking a unified treatment. We propose CUBic, a Coordinated and Unified framework for Bimanual perception and control that reformulates bimanual coordination as a unified perceptual modeling problem. CUBic learns a shared tokenized representation bridging perception and control, where independence and coordination emerge intrinsically from structure rather than from hand-crafted coupling. Our approach integrates three components: unidirectional perception aggregation, bidirectional perception coordination through two codebooks with shared mapping, and a unified perception-to-control diffusion policy. Extensive experiments on the RoboTwin benchmark show that CUBic consistently surpasses standard baselines, achieving marked improvements in coordination accuracy and task success rates over state-of-the-art visuomotor baselines.

Mobile manipulation requires coordinated control of high-dimensional, bimanual robots. Imitation learning methods have been broadly used to solve these robotic tasks, yet typically ignore the bilateral morphological symmetry inherent in such systems. We argue that morphological symmetry is an underexplored but crucial inductive bias for learning in bimanual mobile manipulation: knowing how to solve a task in one configuration directly determines how to solve its mirrored counterpart. In this paper, we formalize this symmetry prior and show that it constrains optimal bimanual policies to be ambidextrous and equivariant under reflections across the robot's sagittal plane. We introduce a $\mathbb{C}_2$-equivariant flow matching policy that enforces reflective symmetry either via a regularized training loss or an equivariant velocity network. Across planar and 6-DoF mobile manipulation tasks, symmetry-informed policies consistently improve sample efficiency and achieve zero-shot generalization to mirrored configurations absent from the training distribution. We further validate this zero-shot generalization capability on a real-world manipulation task with a TIAGo++ robot. Together, our findings establish morphological symmetry as an effective, generalizable, and scalable inductive bias for ambidextrous generative policy learning.

Although robotic manipulation has made significant progress, reliable execution remains challenging because task failures are inevitable in dynamic and unstructured environments. To handle such failures, existing frameworks typically follow a stepwise detect-reason-recover pipeline, which often incurs high latency and limited robustness due to delayed reasoning and reactive planning. Inspired by the human capability to anticipate and proactively plan for potential failures, we introduce AgentChord, an agentic system that models a manipulation task as a directed task graph. Before execution, this graph is enriched with anticipatory recovery branches that specify context-aware corrective behaviors, enabling immediate and targeted responses when failures occur. Specifically, AgentChord operates through a choreography of specialized agents: a composer that structures the nominal task graph, an arranger that augments the graph with anticipatory recovery branches, and a conductor that compiles and coordinates executable transitions using low-latency monitors to detect deviations and trigger pre-compiled recoveries without re-planning. Empirical studies on diverse long-horizon bimanual manipulation tasks demonstrate that AgentChord substantially improves success rates and execution efficiency, advancing the reliability and autonomy of real-world robotic systems. The project page is available at: https://shengxu.net/AgentChord/.

Manipulating Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs) is challenging in robotics due to their infinite-dimensional configuration space and complex nonlinear dynamics. In teleoperation, depth uncertainty hinders state perception and reaction. AssistDLO addresses this challenge as an assistive teleoperation framework for DLO manipulation that combines real-time multi-view state estimation, visual assistance (VA), and a geometry-aware shared-autonomy controller based on Control Barrier Functions (SA-CBF). While traditional shared autonomy methods often rely on simple geometric attractors and may fail to preserve DLO geometry, SA-CBF acts as a geometry-aware funnel, facilitating precise grasping while preserving the operator's high-level authority. The framework is evaluated in a bimanual knot-untangling user study (N = 22) using ropes with varying length and rigidity. Results show that the effectiveness of the assistance depends strongly on operator expertise and DLO properties. SA-CBF provides the strongest gains for naive users, acting as a skill equalizer that increases task success from 71% to 88%, and is effective for stiffer ropes. Conversely, expert users prefer VA, and highly compliant, long ropes benefit more from visual support than localized action assistance. Ultimately, these findings demonstrate that effective DLO teleoperation cannot rely on a fixed strategy, highlighting the critical need for adaptive, user-aware, and material-aware shared autonomy.

Embodied intelligence has advanced rapidly in recent years; however, bimanual manipulation-especially in contact-rich tasks remains challenging. This is largely due to the lack of datasets with rich physical interaction signals, systematic task organization, and sufficient scale. To address these limitations, we introduce the VTOUCH dataset. It leverages vision based tactile sensing to provide high-fidelity physical interaction signals, adopts a matrix-style task design to enable systematic learning, and employs automated data collection pipelines covering real-world, demand-driven scenarios to ensure scalability. To further validate the effectiveness of the dataset, we conduct extensive quantitative experiments on cross-modal retrieval as well as real-robot evaluation. Finally, we demonstrate real-world performance through generalizable inference across multiple robots, policies, and tasks.

Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful reasoning engines for embodied control. In particular, In-Context Learning (ICL) enables off-the-shelf, text-only LLMs to predict robot actions without any task-specific training while preserving their generalization capabilities. Applying ICL to bimanual manipulation remains challenging as the high-dimensional joint action space and tight inter-arm coordination constraints rapidly overwhelm standard context windows. To address this, we introduce BiCICLe (Bimanual Coordinated In-Context Learning), the first framework that enables standard LLMs to perform few-shot bimanual manipulation without fine-tuning. BiCICLe frames bimanual control as a multi-agent leader-follower problem, decoupling the action space into sequential, conditioned single-arm predictions. Evaluated on 13 tasks from the TWIN benchmark, BiCICLe achieves 70.5% average success rate, outperforming the best training-free baseline by 6.1 percentage points and surpassing most supervised methods. We also demonstrate superior real-world performance on 3 tasks without hardware-specific retraining.

Bimanual mobile manipulation requires a seamless integration between high-level semantic reasoning and safe, compliant physical interaction - a challenge that end-to-end models approach opaquely and classical controllers lack the context to address. This paper presents GenerativeMPC, a hierarchical cyber-physical framework that explicitly bridges semantic scene understanding with physical control parameters for bimanual mobile manipulators. The system utilizes a Vision-Language Model with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (VLM-RAG) to translate visual and linguistic context into grounded control constraints, specifically outputting dynamic velocity limits and safety margins for a Whole-Body Model Predictive Controller (MPC). Simultaneously, the VLM-RAG module modulates virtual stiffness and damping gains for a unified impedance-admittance controller, enabling context-aware compliance during human-robot interaction. Our framework leverages an experience-driven vector database to ensure consistent parameter grounding without retraining. Experimental results in MuJoCo, IsaacSim, and on a physical bimanual platform confirm a 60% speed reduction near humans and safe, socially-aware navigation and manipulation through semantic-to-physical parameter grounding. This work advances the field of human-centric cybernetics by grounding large-scale cognitive models into predictable, high-frequency physical control loops.

In the context of robot learning for manipulation, curated datasets are an important resource for advancing the state of the art; however, available datasets typically only include successful executions or are focused on one particular type of skill. In this short paper, we briefly describe a dataset of various skills performed in the context of coffee preparation. The dataset, which we call COFFAIL, includes both successful and anomalous skill execution episodes collected with a physical robot in a kitchen environment, a couple of which are performed with bimanual manipulation. In addition to describing the data collection setup and the collected data, the paper illustrates the use of the data in COFFAIL to learn a robot policy using imitation learning.

Bimanual dexterous grasping is a fundamental and promising area in robotics, yet its progress is constrained by the lack of comprehensive datasets and powerful generation models. In this work, we propose BiDexGrasp, consisting of a large-scale bimanual dexterous grasp dataset and a novel learning-based framework. For dataset construction, we propose a novel bimanual grasp synthesis pipeline to efficiently annotate physically feasible data. This pipeline addresses the challenges of high-dimensional bimanual grasping through a two-stage synthesis strategy of efficient region-based grasp initialization and decoupled force-closure grasp optimization. Powered by this pipeline, we construct a large-scale bimanual dexterous grasp dataset, comprising 6351 diverse objects with sizes ranging from 30 to 80 cm, along with 9.53 million annotated grasp data. Based on this dataset, we further introduce a novel learning-based dexterous grasping generation framework. The framework lies in two key designs: a bimanual coordination module and a geometry-size-adaptive grasp generation strategy to generate coordinated and high-quality grasps on unseen objects. Extensive experiments conducted in both simulation and real world demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed data synthesis pipeline and learned generative framework.

Developing a unified policy for multi-task robotic manipulation remains challenging due to policy degradation from task interference and negative transfer. In this work, we propose Mixture-of-Experts-Enhanced Action Chunking Transformer (MoE-ACT), a parameter-efficient multi-task visuomotor framework tailored for bimanual manipulation. MoE-ACT incorporates sparse MoE layers into the ACT encoder, dynamically routing image tokens to selected experts based on task context, visual observations, and proprioceptive states. Furthermore, the framework incorporates task-conditioned Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) in the action decoder alongside multi-scale cross-attention, ensuring precise task grounding and capturing fine-grained spatial cues. Extensive evaluations on the RoboTwin 2.0 benchmark across 16 challenging bimanual tasks demonstrate that MoE-ACT achieves an average success rate of 62.0%, outperforming standard ACT by 17.4 percentage points. Crucially, with only 195M activated parameters, MoE-ACT surpasses the 16-fold larger foundation model $π$0 (3.24B) by 5.1 percentage points, exhibiting substantial gains in parameter efficiency and deployment feasibility. Real-robot dual-arm experiments consistently confirm its superior multi-task execution capabilities. Our open-source project page can be found at https://j3k7.github.io/MoE-ACT/.

Bimanual manipulation requires both temporal task structure - which actions precede or overlap others - and concrete timing - when each action starts and how long it takes. Symbolic relations enable high-level reasoning about task structure and alternative execution sequences, while concrete timing parameters are essential for coordinating two hands at the execution level. Existing approaches address these two levels in isolation, leaving a gap between task planning and movement synchronization. This work presents an approach for learning symbolic and subsymbolic temporal task constraints from human demonstrations and deriving executable, temporally parametrized plans for bimanual manipulation. Specifically, our contributions are (i) a 3-D representation of timings with methods based on multivariate Gaussian Mixture Models to represent temporal relationships between actions on a subsymbolic level, (ii) a method based on the Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland algorithm that finds and ranks all contradiction-free Allen relation assignments of a task, representing its modes, and (iii) an optimization-based planning system combining the identified symbolic and subsymbolic temporal task constraints to derive parametrized plans for robot execution. We quantitatively evaluate our approach and show that the inferred symbolic task constraints are more accurate than those of prior heuristic approaches and that the generated plans are temporally closer to human demonstrations than the most characteristic demonstration. Additionally, we qualitatively demonstrate its applicability through orchestrated task executions in simulation and on real robots.

Bimanual dexterous manipulation relies on integrating multimodal inputs to perform complex real-world tasks. To address the challenges of effectively combining these modalities, we propose DECO, a decoupled multimodal diffusion transformer that disentangles vision, proprioception, and tactile signals through specialized conditioning pathways, enabling structured and controllable integration of multimodal inputs, with a lightweight adapter for parameter-efficient injection of additional signals. Alongside DECO, we release DECO-50 dataset for bimanual dexterous manipulation with tactile sensing, consisting of 50 hours of data and over 5M frames, collected via teleoperation on real dual-arm robots. We train DECO on DECO-50 and conduct extensive real-world evaluation with over 2,000 robot rollouts. Experimental results show that DECO achieves the best performance across all tasks, with a 72.25% average success rate and a 21% improvement over the baseline. Moreover, the tactile adapter brings an additional 10.25% average success rate across all tasks and a 20% gain on complex contact-rich tasks while tuning less than 10% of the model parameters.

Real-robot demonstrations are prohibitively expensive, while simulation data and real-world human demonstrations are both scalable but each leaves a distinct gap: simulation suffers from a sim-to-real visual gap, and human data suffers from a human-to-robot embodiment gap. In this work, we identify a natural yet underexplored complementarity between these sources: simulation contributes robot-valid actions absent in human data, while human data provides real-world observations that simulation struggles to render. Building on this insight, we present SimHum, a co-training recipe that extracts kinematic priors from simulation and visual priors from human observations, then fine-tunes on a small real-robot dataset. SimHum exhibits strong scene-generalizable and data-efficient capabilities. With only 80 real-robot episodes per task, it achieves 62.5% success on held-out OOD scenes across four bimanual tabletop tasks, 53.7% higher than Real only in absolute success rate. Moreover, in a controlled data-collection study with matched collection time, SimHum improves over the best single-source pre-training baseline by 35.0% in absolute success rate. Project page: https://kaipengfang.github.io/sim-and-human/

Non-prehensile manipulation, encompassing ungraspable actions such as pushing, poking, pivoting, and wrapping, remains underexplored due to its contact-rich and analytically intractable nature. We revisit this problem from two perspectives. First, instead of relying on single-arm setups or favorable environmental supports (e.g., walls or edges), we advocate a generalizable dual-arm configuration and establish a suite of Bimanual Non-prehensile Manipulation Primitives (BiNoMaP). Second, departing from prevailing RL-based approaches, we propose a three-stage, RL-free framework for learning structured non-prehensile skills. We begin by extracting bimanual hand motion trajectories from egocentric video demonstrations. Since these coarse trajectories suffer from perceptual noise and morphological discrepancies, we introduce a geometry-aware post-optimization algorithm to refine them into executable manipulation primitives consistent with predefined motion patterns. To enable category-level generalization, the learned primitives are further parameterized by object-relevant geometric attributes, primarily size, allowing adaptation to unseen instances with significant shape variations. Importantly, BiNoMaP supports cross-embodiment transfer: the same primitives can be deployed on two real-world dual-arm platforms with distinct kinematic configurations, without redesigning skill structures. Extensive real-robot experiments across diverse objects and spatial configurations demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and strong generalization capability of our approach.

Many robotic tasks, such as inverse kinematics, motion planning, and contact-rich manipulation, can be formulated as optimization problems. Solving these problems requires addressing inherent nonlinear kinematics, complex contact dynamics, long-horizon correlations, and multi-modal optimization landscapes, each posing distinct challenges for state-of-the-art optimizers. While existing methods tackle these issues through problem-specific strategies, such specialization inherently limits cross-task generalization, requires heavy engineering effort in problem reformulation, and hinders multi-task autonomy. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) offers a compelling framework that generalizes across diverse robotic tasks via strategic exploration of the solution space. However, it typically suffers from combinatorial complexity when applied naively, resulting in slow convergence and excessive storage space in high-dimensional domains. To address this limitation, we propose Tensor Train Tree Search (TTTS), which leverages tensor factorization to exploit implicit correlations among different branches within the decision tree. By utilizing the resulting compact, linear-complexity representation, TTTS significantly reduces both computation and storage overhead, thereby enabling highly efficient global decision making. Experimental results across inverse kinematics, motion planning around obstacles, legged robot manipulation, multi-stage motion planning, and bimanual whole-body manipulation demonstrate the efficiency of TTTS for generalized robot optimization over a diverse set of tasks.