Grasp Generation

Dexterous grasping requires deciding where to grasp, reaching the target, and maintaining stable contact. We connect these stages through a compact three-point interface that separates global geometric reasoning from local contact control. Given object geometry and optional language commands, our framework samples contact triples from a precomputed grasp-affordance heatmap. A model-based reactive controller tracks the object, avoids collisions, and guides the hand toward the selected contacts. In the final centimeters, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) policy uses proprioceptive feedback to refine and stabilize the grasp despite reaching and perception errors. It observes only finger joint states and its recent actions, with no target points, visual observations, or object geometry, so a single policy is shared across objects and grasp configurations. In simulation, we compare grasp-and-lift success against squeeze and end-to-end baselines, characterize reaching convergence, and demonstrate grasp steering; hardware demonstrations on two training objects and one unseen object illustrate the full pipeline. Our modular framework uses geometry to guide the reach and local feedback to secure the grasp.

Reaching a 6-DoF grasp pose in clutter requires a collision-free trajectory, conventionally obtained by reconstructing the scene in 3D and planning inside that reconstruction, at the cost of its accuracy and compute. Potential fields learned directly from images remove that dependency but inherit the classical weakness of artificial potential fields: where attractive and repulsive gradients cancel, the descent grazes the obstacle instead of going around it, and can stall short of the goal. We present an SE(3) neural potential field learned from posed RGB images and supervised with a navigation function, the geodesic distance to the grasp through free space recovered from those same images during training, which removes both failures. On two tabletop scenes, from obstacle-blocked starts executed on a UR10, the field converges within 3 cm of the grasp from every start and every path it executes is collision-free against the ground-truth geometry, against 25% and 0% under image supervision alone; mean clearance rises from under a centimeter to 8.6-8.8 cm and arm-link contacts fall from 20.6-50.4% to 2.7-5.5% of executed configurations. Executed grasp success is 90.0% and 40.0% on the two scenes, the residual failures being refusals of the Cartesian executor rather than of the field. Planning takes about 2 s against 67-133 s for RRT* on a reconstruction of the same images, though under a common offline harness the two are comparable: the deployed margin is the cost of collision-checking a dense reconstruction, not planner complexity.

Visual grasp proposal generation has advanced rapidly, yet converting a selected proposal into a stable physical grasp remains a central execution-stage challenge. This paper introduces GraspTune, a tactile-driven execution-stage refinement framework that starts from a nominal proposal and applies bounded residual TCP motions during approach, contact formation, and final grasp execution. GraspTune learns control-facing contact semantics from local depth, tactile signals, state, and history using state-conditioned expert contact queries and multi-task supervision for contact change, contact risk, and post-close readiness. The representation conditions a diffusion-pretrained residual policy and is aligned with PPO for closed-loop execution. Across more than 60,000 simulated executions over 20 object categories, GraspTune establishes an execution-layer benefit across four proposal generators, raising stable grasp success by +19.22, +9.55, +12.45, and +20.70 percentage points for GraspNet, Contact-GraspNet, AnyGrasp, and VGN. A four-fold held-out category study raises unseen-object execution from 54.58% to 70.33%, showing category-disjoint generalization of contact correction. Across more than 1,000 real-robot trials on a UR5e setup with Xense fingertip sensors, GraspTune raises GraspNet execution from 71.0% to 84.3%, validating direct transfer without realworld policy fine-tuning. Together, these results turn visually plausible proposals into stable physical grasps for downstream contact-rich manipulation. A supplementary video is available at https://youtu.be/kcq7fSLNtzU.

Dexterous grasping in clutter poses a basic sensing question: when do tactile measurements and external wrench estimates improve on visual geometry? Occlusion and contact can obscure grasp quality, motivating a controlled evaluation of these interaction signals. We present a controlled real-world study over five tabletop scene conditions on a dexterous system that combines vision, per-finger and wrist wrench estimates, and distributed fingertip taxels. With demonstrations, visual observations, action space, and compliant control fixed, we compare vision-only, wrench, taxel, and combined policies plus representation and fusion baselines. The combined policy succeeds in 24/25 trials versus 14/25 for vision only, and 15/15 versus 6/15 across the three confined conditions. Ablations show that wrench and taxel feedback are complementary. Behavioral comparisons show that interaction feedback enables earlier rejection of inadequate contacts, regrasping before lift, and more stable grasps. To our knowledge, this is the first real-world study to combine and separately evaluate these interaction modalities for target-oriented dexterous grasping in clutter. These results chart a widening vision-interaction gap and position cluttered dexterous grasping as a benchmark for determining when the learned policy needs interaction sensing. Project website: https://interaction-dex-grasp.github.io/

Task-oriented grasping (TOG) requires robots to grasp functional parts of objects (e.g., the handle of a mug for pouring), yet these affordance regions are frequently occluded in cluttered scenes. Active perception via next-best-view (NBV) planning can resolve such occlusions by moving the camera for more informative observations. However, existing NBV methods typically optimize viewpoints for grasping the target object as a whole without distinguishing which part is task-relevant. A naive adaptation, fully scanning the target object before predicting the affordance, wastes most of the viewpoint budget on task-irrelevant surfaces (e.g., the mug body for pouring). To address this, we propose ATAP, an Affordance-Targeted Active Perception framework that shifts viewpoint planning from exhaustive target scanning to targeted affordance verification. ATAP hypothesizes the occluded target geometry via a generative shape prior and predicts the affordance distribution over the imagined complete surface. In cluttered scenes, severe occlusion can make the location of the hidden affordance ambiguous, leaving multiple locations plausible given the partial observation. ATAP therefore introduces an uncertainty-aware viewpoint planner that jointly optimizes expected entropy reduction over these competing hypotheses and expected affordance verification gain from real observations. This process iterates until the affordance is sufficiently verified for grasp execution. Experiments in simulation and real-world cluttered scenes show that ATAP substantially improves the functional grasp success rate over fixed-view TOG baselines, and outperforms reconstruction-based active perception with over 57% fewer NBV steps.

Effective manipulation across diverse objects is critical for applications ranging from agricultural harvesting to laboratory and domestic automation. While the inherent compliance of soft robotics is well suited to this challenge, designing grippers that generalize across tasks remains difficult due to the vast design space of continuum mechanics and the risk of overfitting to specific scenarios. We propose a graph-based design space for representing soft structures and mechanisms, coupled with a multi-objective, diversity-driven genetic optimization framework that explicitly promotes solution variety throughout the design process. Using multiple grasping scenarios during optimization, we study how task diversity influences the emergence of generalization to unseen objects and contact conditions. Our results show that optimization over a sufficiently diverse set of grasping cases leads to designs with emergent generalization, exhibiting improved robustness compared to task-specific solutions on novel scenarios. These findings suggest that diversity-driven optimization offers a principled pathway toward general-purpose soft grippers, aligned with the adaptable nature of soft robotics.

Placing a grasped book into a tight shelf is a compact but difficult contact-rich control problem: millimetre-scale pose error can turn a geometrically valid approach into jamming, failed release, or incomplete seating. We study this final phase after grasp acquisition and global approach, and ask how control authority should be divided between known geometry and learned behaviour. Our method retains a nominal task-space controller for structured insertion and seating, while residual PPO supplies bounded local corrections and decides when to release. Only the brief open-retreat-reclose transition is scripted. For the final policy used on hardware, a deployment-matched simulation evaluation over 512 fixed conditions yields 98.50 percent mean success (0.23 percentage-point sample SD) across three independent training runs, compared with 37.89 percent for nominal control. On the physical xArm7, 60 trials over 30 matched conditions show the same qualitative advantage: residual control raises success from 26.7 percent to 63.3 percent, reduces failures from 22 to 11, and wins 13 of the 15 matched conditions in which the two controllers differ. Robustness tests show that performance remains above 87 percent under initialization perturbations up to 1.5x, while very tight clearances expose the geometric limit of local correction. These results support a hybrid design in which geometry preserves reliable task structure and learning is concentrated on the contact-sensitive behaviour that fixed rules handle poorly.

A geometrically valid placement can still be difficult to execute because the selected grasp changes the required end-effector pose, collision geometry, and transport motion. Placement is formulated as a pre-execution ranking problem in which supplied grasp-placement candidates are scored before planning. The model combines a typed target-conditioned point cloud with three pose descriptors and hierarchical heads for planning success and execution success conditioned on planning. On a 30-object, 1,235-scene dataset with scene-group-held-out splits, three-seed top-1 success on covered test groups reaches 85.63 +/- 1.08% for joint selection and 79.84 +/- 0.16% for fixed-target ranking. For the designated frozen seed-42 checkpoint, top-1 success improves from 72.84% to 85.78% over full-pool cuMotion for joint ranking and from 59.65% to 79.67% for fixed-target ranking. Frozen transfer to xArm7/MoveIt requires no xArm-specific retraining. Across 27 locked cases, 13 complete end to end (48.15%). Of the 16 cases that pass Top-5 preflight and begin execution, 13 succeed (81.25%). Candidate-level deployment-feasibility prediction reaches 81.25% recall, 85.20% specificity, and 83.23% balanced accuracy.

Robotic garment unfolding is essential for downstream tasks, yet quasi-static methods require repeated actions, while existing dynamic approaches predominantly rely on bimanual flinging. We present RotateIt!, a single-arm framework that uses adaptive axial rotation for dynamic garment unfolding. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first unfolding framework to employ dynamic axial rotation as its primary manipulation primitive. From a randomly initialized tabletop configuration, the robot selects a rotation-effective grasp and rotates the lifted garment about an approximately fixed anchor, generating inertial tension that separates overlapping layers within a compact workspace. A grasp ranker selects the anchor, while an online residual policy adapts the rotation extent and speed, thereby determining the release timing. Across seen and unseen simulated garments and eight unseen real garments, RotateIt! improves success within three attempts by 44.0-61.0 percentage points over quasi-static pick-and-place. The simulation-trained policies transfer zero-shot to the real world, achieving 75.6% success, 41% higher first-attempt coverage, and 26% higher final coverage. The resulting states further enable autonomous robotic folding without manual rearrangement.

Dexterous robot hands must often grasp objects whose shape, size, and pose are known only approximately. Grasp planners typically require accurate object models or correct errors with feedback, but how much inaccuracy a closing motion can tolerate on its own remains unclear. To address this question, we designed a motion planner based on four principles: a coarse template of the object, human grasp types, an object-centric interaction, and compliant, sliding contacts instead of prescribed contact points. This paper presents the planner, implemented through virtual model control, and its evaluation on a Shadow Dexterous Hand. Without feedback, the planned closing motions tolerated size errors of about 1cm and pose errors of several centimeters and tens of degrees, a wider range than a state-of-the-art data-driven planner in 25 of 27 tested conditions. They also grasped 82.5% of 80 everyday objects and succeeded within an autonomous pipeline. Robustness can thus be designed into the closing motion itself, rather than left only to feedback. This planner opens a path toward reliable manipulation in uncertain settings, which we will pursue by combining it with adaptive feedback control on the physical hand.

Ropes, cables, and other deformable linear objects appear in tasks from untangling to cable routing and suturing, yet controlling their shape remains a challenge in robot manipulation. We study model-based shape control in a general setting: the object lies unfixated on a support surface and two arms may grasp and move it anywhere along its length. Because each arm chooses a grasp point, direction, and magnitude, the joint action space is combinatorially large, and the dynamics model's per-prediction cost bounds how much of it a planner can search. We present ForwardDLO, a recurrent latent dynamics model for this unfixated bimanual setting that predicts per-segment displacements grounded in the observed rope state at every step. Our model reaches accuracy comparable to more expensive baselines while containing no explicit segment-to-segment operations, which makes batched evaluation of candidate actions cheap. On open-loop prediction of real rope motion it reaches the lowest error of the learned models we evaluate, 13% below the strongest baseline. Within a fixed time budget it scores 8 to 22 times more candidate actions than models of comparable accuracy while matching them in real-world shape matching; and on a simulated routing task at a 30Hz control rate, this throughput converts into 98% task success versus at most 30% for the baselines at their own budgets. We release the model, code, and a dataset of 2.42 million simulated and 14,107 real rope transitions at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ForwardDLO/

Aerial grasping is a remarkable capability exhibited by predatory birds, allowing them to capture prey through highly coordinated maneuvers in flight. Inspired by this capability, researchers have developed various formulations to reproduce such maneuvers through trajectory optimization. However, two limitations remain in practice. First, the resulting optimization problem is highly nonconvex and sensitive to initialization, making high-quality solutions difficult to obtain under a limited computational budget. Second, prescribed numerical objectives are human-designed abstractions that describe successful grasping through a limited set of mathematically tractable quantities and may not fully capture what determines task success. We investigate how learning can address these limitations within an analytical planner. Accordingly, a trajectory prior is first learned from optimized motions and then evolved through a CEM-based process that evaluates sampled initializations with the deployed optimizer and retains favorable ones as new supervision. An Execution-Aware Critic learns from contact, lift, and completion outcomes to assess whether the optimized trajectories are likely to succeed in physical execution. Its frozen energy can further serve as a differentiable grasping cost, allowing execution data to directly shape trajectory generation. Simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate improved optimization reliability, trajectory consistency, and grasping performance.

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/.

Fresh-market blueberries require selective, gentle picking, which is labor-intensive and expensive. Over-the-row machine harvesters are fast but non-selective, bruising mixed-ripeness fruit and limiting yield to the processing market. Selective robotic harvesters typically target individual fruits rather than fruit clusters, which limits harvesting efficiency for small, densely clustered blueberries. This paper presents CLASP, a Cluster-Level Autonomous Selective Picking robot with a Soft Active Rolling-Band Gripper (SARB-Gripper). Two compliant bands envelop the cluster and roll against the fruit, drawing mature berries off in sequence, while closed-loop regulation of the pulling force keeps the applied load below the immature detachment threshold. A global-to-local perception pipeline pairs an eye-to-hand camera for global cluster detection and target selection with an eye-in-hand camera for local localization and cluster orientation estimation. Field measurements confirm a clear detachment-force separation between mature and immature fruit, and the SARB-Gripper reproduces a commanded pulling force to within \SI{3.7}{\percent}, enabling selective harvesting at the cluster level. In end-to-end field trials, CLASP autonomously grasped 23 of 25 presented clusters (\SI{92}{\percent}). With the component cost of approximately $3326 per unit, CLASP offers a scalable approach to selective cluster-level harvesting for fresh-market blueberries.

Detecting and grasping small objects remains a significant challenge in robotics. Active vision, where the robot moves closer to the object, is an intuitive solution, yet comparing approaches on common ground is difficult since identical physical scene setups are required. Hence, we introduce BRAVE-6D, a benchmark designed to evaluate robotic active vision systems for object pose estimation, a crucial first step in grasping objects. BRAVE-6D leverages view synthesis based on Gaussian Splats (3DGS) to provide scenes and tools for benchmarking active vision systems. We show baseline solutions performing visual servoing within the scene and accurately estimating the poses of small objects.

Dexterous grasping is usually conducted for specific tasks, leading to heterogeneous constraints such as specific approach directions, desired contact regions, specified wrist trajectories, and functional hand poses. Our previous work, GraspXL, achieves scalable grasping motion synthesis for diverse objects and hand morphologies, while lacking controllability for synthesis under such various task-driven constraints. In this paper, we propose ConGraspXL, which extends GraspXL with controllable constraint-conditioned grasp motion synthesis that accommodates diverse task-driven constraints and their combinations. We introduce a hierarchical constraint formulation, enable flexible constraint composition with a masked residual interface, and improve control precision with dynamic hand centers and feed-forward wrist guidance. Without losing the strong generalization capabilities of GraspXL, ConGraspXL enables precise and flexible controllability for various individual constraints and their combinations, providing a plug-and-play low-level grasp controller for downstream applications such as whole-body grasp completion, functional grasping, and human-motion imitation.

Robust grasping of everyday objects remains challenging for parallel-jaw grippers, particularly when handling sloped or asymmetric items that induce torque-driven rolling and shear slip. These challenges become even more severe in domestic environments such as kitchens, where objects are often wet or submerged, drastically reducing friction between the gripper and the object. To address these issues, we present a waterproof passive adaptive gripper that combines local and global adaptability for high-performance grasping in the submerged environments. The proposed gripper features a fully waterproof design that integrates a passive rotational joint for global self-alignment on sloped surfaces and passive variable-stiffness pads for local surface adaptation. Experiments in both dry and underwater conditions on various cylindrical and conical objects demonstrate superior holding capability and grasp robustness compared to rigid-pad and fixed-joint baselines. The proposed design offers a practical and robust solution that successfully enables stable underwater manipulation of diverse everyday objects, effectively addressing a critical gap in current underwater robotic grasping for daily-life applications.

Robots are increasingly used in unstructured environments. The need for them to safely grasp unknown objects without damaging them becomes crucial. Humans achieve this by sensing and quickly responding by adjusting their grasping force. Similarly, effective grasp acquisition in robots requires compliant interaction strategies that can adapt to uncertain object properties and adjust to any instabilities during manipulation. We present a geometry-aware force/torque-based contact estimation method for a coarse position-controlled gripper, combined with an adaptive admittance controller for safe grasp acquisition. The desired contact forces are estimated online to keep stable contact with objects of unknown properties. This enables compliant and stable grasps while avoiding excessive forces. Experiments with objects of different sizes, shapes, stiffnesses, and weights show that the proposed algorithm not only prevents slippage but also applies minimal force to safely grasp an object without causing excessive deformation.

Category-level in-hand manipulation of articulated objects is a formidable yet underexplored challenge for dexterous robotic hands. This difficulty stems from two core bottlenecks: first, controlling an object's internal degrees of freedom is tightly coupled with maintaining grasp stability on a free-floating base; second, acquiring diverse object models and functional grasps at scale is highly labor-intensive, yet vital for generalization given the system's sensitivity to initial configurations. In this work, we present ArtManip, the first category-level articulated in-hand manipulation method that generalizes across object instances and diverse initial grasps. For initial configuration construction, we develop an automated pipeline that procedurally generates diverse articulated objects and synthesizes task-oriented functional grasps. For policy learning, we propose a robust two-stage training strategy that incorporates articulation physics randomization, reward curriculum, and latent representation distillation to handle complex contact and joint dynamics during deployment. Extensive experiments across four object categories demonstrate that our policy generalizes to unseen instances and varied configurations in simulation, and achieves zero-shot transfer to 12 real-world objects featuring diverse shapes and joint mechanics.

Magnetic levitation (MagLev) systems have great potential for application in high-mix, low-volume manufacturing due to their scalability and flexibility, enabling highly reconfigurable in-machine material flow. However, their manipulation capabilities remain largely unexploited, as current applications almost exclusively focus on transportation. To enable grasping and manipulation directly on MagLev systems without requiring additional costly handling equipment, such as industrial robot arms, we present the Gripper MagBot, a low-cost parallel 6-DoF manipulator with an integrated 1-DoF gripper that mechanically couples three MagLev movers. The Gripper MagBot supports two operating configurations: a default mode and a single-track mode, selectable depending on the required stability and workspace footprint. To reconfigure a machine, the MagBot can be autonomously dropped off and picked up using a docking station. We showcase pick-and-place examples in simulation, as well as with the real Gripper MagBot using our inverse kinematics controller. CAD files, assembly instructions, a component list, and videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/gripper-magbot.

Generated hand-object interaction (HOI) videos provide a controllable way to propose manipulation motions. Simulation-based HOI tracking can translate such kinematic references into feasible low-level control, but its scalability is limited by the lack of reliable reference motions. We therefore combine generated videos with simulation-based HOI grounding: during training, generated videos provide diverse motion references for learning a multi-object, multi-trajectory HOI tracker, and at deployment, the video model produces motion plans that are executed by the learned tracker. In particular, we propose a method that enables scalable reference generation by HOI reconstruction with minimal manual intervention and successfully grounds more than 1,500 generated videos in simulation, achieving success rates over 25 percentage points higher than those of baselines during simulation-based training. In real-world closed-loop experiments, it achieves diverse grasps, including functional grasps, non-prehensile manipulation, and post-grasp object-pose tracking. Videos and code are available at https://boyuan-an.github.io/GALATEA/.

Transferring human hand demonstrations to robotic grippers has recently emerged as a cost-effective solution for robot learning. However, existing methods are largely confined to simple, planar tasks and fail to handle complex spatial movements (e.g., intricate trajectories involving rotations or flips) that are essential for robot manipulation. Motivated by this gap, we adopt an implicit, data-driven approach guided by fine-grained hand-pose motions. To this end, we introduce a scalable acquisition pipeline to collect hand-gripper paired demonstrations, governed by a rigorous protocol that prioritizes motion complexity and leverages a handheld gripper for seamless action mimicry. This yields a large-scale paired dataset comprising 6,189 episodes across 1,254 unique objects, exhibiting significantly higher spatial complexity than existing benchmarks. However, learning such complex mappings remains challenging. We observe that naive end-to-end generation of full gripper pose sequences is insufficient, as minor trajectory deviations compound rapidly under intricate dynamics. To address this, we propose a two-stage framework: Stage I predicts sparse gripper keyframes (initial and terminal) to simplify the mapping objective, while Stage II generates the full continuous action sequence conditioned on these keyframes. Furthermore, to mitigate cumulative drift, we keep the gripper's orientation being learned while post-optimizing its translation based on the grasping heuristic and kinematic consistency. In both simulation and real-robot experiments, our framework enables stable and precise hand-to-gripper transfer of complex spatial manipulations, significantly outperforming traditional baselines. Project page: https://cosmoh2g.github.io.

Estimating the 6D pose of textureless objects without prior CAD models remains a critical challenge due to the lack of appearance features. While recent generalizable approaches alleviate the dependence on object-specific models, their performance on low-texture objects is often limited by insufficient geometric constraints in the underlying representations. In this work, we propose PG-Pose, a geometry-aware framework combining Planar-based Gaussian Splatting (PGS) reconstruction and Geometry-driven pose optimization. In the offline representation extraction stage, three distinct representations of the object are extracted from multi-view reference RGB images with known poses. PG-Pose reconstructs a 3D Gaussian representation and renders high-fidelity depth maps to generate 3D point clouds through back projection. In the online pose inference stage, the initial pose of the input image is estimated by 2D-3D correspondence matching between the input image and the reconstructed 3D point clouds, followed by a PGS-Refiner for iterative pose optimization. Evaluations on the OnePose-LowTexture datasets, PG-Pose achieves an average accuracy of 94.2% ADD(S)@0.1d, with a 2.1% improvement average accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) GS-based approach. To further demonstrate the effectiveness of PG-Pose for industrial robots in grasping tasks, we deploy it on a dual-arm industrial robot and successfully realize the grasping task on an unseen object.

Planning six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) grasps for unseen objects in cluttered tabletop scenes from a single-view depth image requires accurate and efficient evaluation of diverse grasp candidates. Existing early-fusion methods capture local object geometry relative to each grasp candidate but repeatedly encode the scene, whereas late-fusion methods reuse a shared scene representation but may lose this grasp-relative local geometry. We propose EquiGQNet, an efficient 6-DoF grasp quality evaluator that combines the strengths of both approaches. For grasp orientation, EquiGQNet replaces the early-fusion operation of rotating and re-encoding the point cloud for each grasp candidate with an SO(3)-equivariant encode-once-then-rotate scheme, yielding grasp-aligned geometric features from a shared scene encoding. For grasp translation, Mid-level Action Fusion (MAF) injects the grasp position into intermediate features before global aggregation, retaining local geometry relative to each candidate. We evaluate EquiGQNet in two grasp planning pipelines: Cross-Entropy Method (CEM)-based continuous grasp search and candidate ranking with a pretrained generative planner. In simulation, EquiGQNet achieves grasping performance comparable to the early-fusion baseline and substantially outperforms late fusion on objects with complex geometry and limited graspable regions, while reducing CEM planning time from 3.31s to 0.48s, a 6.9x speedup over early fusion. In real-world household-object decluttering, EquiGQNet achieves a 95.2% grasp success rate and 230 picks per hour, versus 153 and 170 for early- and late-fusion baselines. Code is available at https://equigqnet.github.io/.

This paper proposes AdaRoboVLG, a task-adaptive Vision-Language-Grasp (VLG) framework that supports generalizable grasp synthesis across different robotic hands. Unlike existing VLG methods that tightly couple foundation models with end-to-end grasp policies, AdaRoboVLG learns an efficient generalizable base policy that generates and evaluates physically feasible grasp candidates through explicit kinematic mapping and force-closure-based stability estimation, while offloading task-dependent understanding to specialized foundation-model modules. These modules provide composable priors that are integrated into the grasp synthesis process, enabling contextually adaptive grasp synthesis without retraining the underlying grasp policy. Through extensive simulation and real-world experiments, we demonstrate that (i) the base policy exhibits efficient learning and strong cross-hand generalization, (ii) the framework effectively incorporates spatial, cognitive, and temporal priors to address three representative grasping challenges without compromising grasp synthesis performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, and (iii) these priors can operate jointly to enable functional grasping in cluttered and dynamic environments. These results indicate that decoupling physical grasp synthesis from task-dependent understanding provides a scalable paradigm for robotic grasping, allowing future advances in foundation models to be directly translated into improved grasp capabilities without redesigning or retraining the underlying grasp policy. Supplementary videos are available at https://adarobovlg.github.io/

This paper presents an end-to-end computational pipeline that converts a selected object mesh, a measured object state, and a selected six-axis robot into an object-specific, unactuated, additively manufacturable gripper. The method couples exact-mesh RGB-D/ICP pose registration, deterministic surface-contact sampling, uncertainty-aware wrench screening, selection among six passive capture mechanisms, object-conformal surface synthesis, full-orientation robot inverse kinematics, a swept-volume-aware manufacturing domain, directional fused-deposition finite-element screening, and constrained three-dimensional SIMP topology optimization. Unlike workflows that treat grasp selection, tool geometry, motion, and structural design as separate problems, every exported design is bound to the source mesh, object pose, robot flange, contact set, and insertion hypothesis by a traceable design identifier. We derive the implemented registration, contact, fit-tolerance, finite-element, and density-optimization equations and prove three properties of the numerical construction: nodal load preservation, monotonic compliance sensitivity under SIMP interpolation, and voxel-domain containment after topology post-processing. Four archived object-specific attempts - a rabbit, camera flange, 3DBenchy, and faceted bust - meet the nominal fit, uncertain-wrench, runtime-sweep, and baseline/post-topology FEA gates. A deliberately enlarged +/-3 mm, +/-5 degree pose stress check differentiates the designs, retaining 29-134 of 160 simulated trials. Their reconstructed topologies retain 92.0-97.6% of the FE domain because functional regions are protected. Archived robot photographs show the corresponding printed assemblies qualitatively, while nominal material properties and absent coupon-calibrated, instrumented tests keep all four at digital-screening status rather than operational release.

Grasping and holding tools while using them presents a considerable challenge not only for robots but also for humans. Such a challenge is particularly noticeable in processes involving assembly and disassembly, where efficiency and consistency depend on performing rapidly adaptive tasks. Nonetheless, contemporary robotic grasping technologies that can securely manipulate tools during operation frequently have significant constraints. In this paper, introduce ARTiS (Adaptive Robotic Tool Gripper in Disassembly Systems), a novel gripper that combines the adaptability of soft grippers, the dexterity of anthropomorphic hands, and the robustness of rigid mechanisms with a soft palm and fingertips. This unique combination makes it possible to hold tools securely in a variety of situations through using active jamming in the palm and fin-ray adaptation in fingertips. Furthermore, high finger dexterity is achieved through the seven degrees of freedom design, which enables the fingertips to orient to any surface, both for automated solutions and collaborative tasks. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted using a range of conventional disassembly tools to assess the gripper's compliance, durability, and functional versatility. More information, hardware instructions, and videos at https://romanmykhailyshyn.github.io/artis/

Augmenting the dexterity of human surgeons has the potential to free them from tedious subtasks. We consider debridement (removal of diseased or dead tissue fragments), which is challenging due to imprecision in spatial perception and cable actuation. We develop an augmented dexterity system for surgical debridement that uses visual servoing to align the cable-driven gripper with the target position in the image plane, and then introduces a novel approach to depth control, MACAW: Monocular Adaptive Compact Attention Windows. Across 100 physical trials using the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) robot, camera-frame servoing reduced average gripper position offset from 37 to fewer than 5 pixels within 4 optimization steps, taking an average of only 0.39s. MACAW significantly outperforms procedural and learned VLA baselines, achieving a 93% success rate at 11 seconds per fragment, yielding a throughput of 304 fragments per hour. Extending MACAW to a bimanual debridement setup maintains a 92% success rate at an average of 7 seconds per fragment, increasing the throughput to 473 fragments per hour.

Language-driven dexterous grasp models, such as DextER, perform well when instructions specify where to grasp, but we find they fail systematically when an instruction also specifies where not to grasp (e.g., "grasp the handle but avoid the body"). Existing training corpora, DexGYSNet among them, contain virtually no avoidance instructions, and collecting examples for every possible constraint is impractical. Moreover, because every part mentioned during training denotes a contact target, models may interpret a forbidden part as another region to grasp rather than one to avoid. We therefore introduce an inference-time framework for negation-constrained dexterous grasping that requires no negation-specific training examples. Combining Sequential Monte Carlo with classifier-free guidance, our method guides sampling toward the instructed part while pruning candidates headed for the forbidden region, without any negation examples during training. A frozen 3D part-grounding model localizes the forbidden region from the language instruction. To evaluate this setting, we construct NegGrasp, a benchmark of paired positive/negative instructions with constraint-aware metrics that credit a grasp only if it both accomplishes the task and respects the stated constraint. On NegGrasp, our method reduces the violation rate of the strongest baseline from 57.9% to 17.2% while improving both constraint-aware and physical success.

Understanding hand-object interaction from egocentric vision is essential for modeling how people physically engage with the surrounding world. Yet reasoning about physically grounded interaction requires estimating the forces acting on hands and objects, beyond localizing contact. We present EgoPHI, the first method that jointly estimates dense contact maps and 3D force distributions on hand and object meshes from a single monocular RGB image and object geometry. To address the lack of scalable ground-truth force annotations, we introduce a physics-based simulation pipeline that augments existing hand-object datasets with dense per-vertex force supervision. EgoPHI then learns dense 3D contact and force on interacting hand and articulated object meshes, extending vision-based force estimation beyond image-space or planar settings. Our evaluation on in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks shows that EgoPHI improves force estimation over existing approaches while generalizing to unseen datasets. To evaluate sim-to-real transfer, we constructed two physical objects that capture dense object contact and force magnitude and used them to record a dataset of interactions from eight participants across diverse touch and grasp types. Our results demonstrate that EgoPHI recovers meaningful 3D contact and force distributions in simulated, out-of-distribution, and real-world settings, advancing egocentric hand-object understanding from contact localization toward physically grounded interaction reasoning.

This technical report describes the RMC2 Team's champion solution for the WBCD 2026 Track 4: Deformable Manipulation Challenge. The task requires a robot to pick a single T-shirt from a stack, load it onto a printing pallet, align the collar with a target area, and smooth the printing region, a sequence that involves single-layer separation, deformable transport, precise placement, and contact-rich surface adjustment. The competition strongly incentivizes fully autonomous execution, motivating the development of an autonomous solution. We built a fully autonomous system around the TCAM (TermiBrain Causal Action Model) framework, with the design principle that hardware, perception, data, and learning should jointly reduce the physical interaction complexity the policy must handle. A custom 3D-printed gripper designed for single-layer fabric separation improves picking reliability on a dual-arm ARX X5 platform. A wrist-centric four-camera setup pairs upper fisheye cameras for task-level context with lower RGB cameras for close-range gripper-cloth contact observation. We combine portable UMI-style demonstrations with real-robot demonstrations collected on the deployable platform to provide both broad manipulation priors and deployment-specific dynamics. TCAM ties these components into a closed loop: each trajectory is analyzed to identify the physical factors contributing to its outcome, driving targeted data recollection and policy fine-tuning. The policy outputs 30-step end-effector delta-pose action chunks from a multi-view VLA backbone. In the final competition, our system loaded 25 T-shirts at an average of approximately 23 seconds per attempt, with 22 achieving the required surface smoothness, securing first place in Track 4.

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.

Robotic manipulation requires perception systemsthat identify actionable parts such as handles, rims, triggers,and tool tips, not merely object categories or point clouds. This paper presents RoboSeg, a part-level semantic reconstructionsystem that links vision-language model (VLM) functional-partdiscovery, asynchronous online RGB-D semantic reconstruc-tion, and task-oriented grasp generation without requiring CAD models or pre-scanned meshes. RoboSeg queries a VLM onthe initial RGB observation to obtain compact functional part prompts, then scans with two asynchronous streams: a high-frequency geometry thread for RGB-D odometry and truncated signed distance function (TSDF) fusion, and a keyframe-triggered semantic thread for SAM3 part masks. Projectedmasks are fused by voxel-level temporal voting into a persistentpart-labeled point cloud; RoboSeg uses this map to assign AnyGrasp 6-DoF candidates to semantic parts and select grasps consistent with the task-relevant part label. RoboSeg reaches 83.4% mean part intersection-over-union (mIoU) over manually labeled objects; in a 24-trial physical pilot across fourobjects and eight tasks, the selected grasp contacts the requestedpart in all trials and achieves 21/24 combined task successes.These results characterize RoboSeg as a semantic indexing layerfor task-conditioned manipulation, with AnyGrasp retained asthe proposal generator.

Conventional robotic grippers often use high-ratio transmissions to generate grasping torque and external force sensors to measure physical interaction. High-ratio transmissions increase friction, reflected inertia, and mechanical impedance, while external sensors add hardware complexity. To address these trade-offs, this study proposes a novel 9-DOF, three-fingered Differential Direct-Drive (DDD) gripper that combines DD motors with a low-ratio (1:2) differential transmission. The mechanism centralizes actuator mass at the base to minimize moving-link inertia, while the differential architecture couples two motors in parallel to amplify torque during flexion. Experiments show that the prototype delivers a nominal grasping force of approximately 18 N and a fingertip force of 4.7 N, while maintaining a low motor contribution to system inertia (0.236%) and low passive mechanical impedance, with a maximum measured value of 50.1 N/m when the motors are unpowered. The proposed hardware addresses the trade-offs among torque, physical transparency, and kinematic dexterity, providing a foundation for high-bandwidth interaction and sensorless proprioceptive force estimation.

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

Delicate manipulation often involves transient and subtle collisions between a grasped object and the environment. While the human hand localizes these contacts effortlessly thanks to superior tactile sensitivity, robotic systems often lack the requisite resolution to acquire the information necessary for motion planning, resulting in clumsy manipulation or even task failure. Here, we propose transient extrinsic contact detection and ranging (TECDAR), a simple yet fast and efficient method for detecting and ranging extrinsic contact of grasped objects. Our design of gripper tips employs dynamic tactile sensing leveraging a single 2.5$\times$3 mm 6D inertial measurement unit. The sensor captures sub-millisecond tip deformations at a 7 kHz sampling rate, but operating on a data stream of only 84 KB/s. High bandwidth and compact data size enable the system to rapidly detect and localize contact between grasped objects and their surroundings. Specifically, fusing tactile data with robot pose via an extended Kalman filter enables fast and precise localization of extrinsic contact, reaching millimeter-level accuracy within 180 ms. Experimental results demonstrate that the system achieves an average localization accuracy of approximately 7,mm in both line-contact and point-contact localization tasks. Furthermore, this near-instantaneous localization enables the robot to rectify its trajectory on a millisecond scale, facilitating precise tool manipulation and enhanced perception of complex environments purely through tactile exploration and mapping. We envision such techniques advancing the future of robotics across domains requiring delicate manipulation, including precision assembly, surgical assistance, and autonomous exploration in touch-dominant environments. Project page: humitlab.github.io/TECDAR/

Large language models can infer sensitive personal attributes, such as age, location, and occupation, from ordinary text, turning everyday writing into a privacy risk. Adversarial anonymization defends against this by rewriting a text with a capable language model that also plays the attacker, but it needs a powerful model at inference time and thus sends private text to a third party, the very exposure anonymization should prevent. Recent work distills this behavior into a small on-device model using supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization (DPO), but DPO only imitates the teacher's offline choices and never directly optimizes the privacy--utility objective we care about. We introduce \textbf{GRASP} (\textbf{G}roup-\textbf{R}elative \textbf{A}nonymization via \textbf{S}elf-refinement \textbf{P}olicy-optimization), which reinforces the local anonymizer online with Group Relative Policy Optimization. A single small model acts as anonymizer, adversary, and utility judge, trained against a self-generated reward that hides attributes while preserving meaning, with a design that guards against reward hacking. Trained on Llama-3.1-8B, \ours{} improves the privacy--utility trade-off over the DPO-distilled baseline, consistently across three independent LLM judges. Against adversarial anonymization driven by frontier models such as Gemini2.5Flash and Claude, it achieves a comparable or better overall trade-off while removing substantially more private information, and it runs entirely on-device at roughly $1\%$ of the GPT-4o teacher's cost.

Humans achieve stable and adaptive grasps by seamlessly integrating visual perception and tactile feedback, a capability that remains challenging to replicate in robotic systems. Existing robotic grasping approaches predominantly rely on visual inputs and lack mechanisms for tactile-guided adaptation after contact, limiting robustness and generalization. To address this challenge, we propose a unified visuo-tactile-fusion grasping framework that integrates grasp generation, feasibility prediction, and adaptive refinement. At its core, our method introduces an efficient visuo-tactile representation that tightly fuses object geometry with tactile feedback by associating tactile signals with finger identities. This unified representation supports contact-aware grasp pose generation during planning and tactile-guided refinement after contact, enabling the system to reason about fine-grained finger-object interactions and adjust grasps dynamically. Comprehensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances grasp success rates and generalization across diverse objects.

Recent data-driven methods for synthesizing 6-DoF grasp poses use generative models to learn complex grasp pose distributions and generate diverse candidate poses. In particular, SE(3)-equivariant flow-based models generate grasp poses that transform consistently with object rotations and translations. However, these methods sample by iterative numerical integration, requiring tens of function evaluations per grasp and limiting their use in real-time manipulation. We propose GraspMeanFlow, an SE(3)-equivariant MeanFlow framework for few-step 6-DoF grasp generation. Our method learns the average velocity over a finite time interval, defined through the time-ordered exponential so that it reproduces exactly the rigid-body displacement accumulated over that interval. We prove that a point-cloud-conditioned distribution transported by an equivariant average-velocity flow map remains invariant, so equivariance is retained under few-step sampling, and we condition the field on a pair of times by lifting both to equivariant vectors, leaving the backbone otherwise unchanged. For stable training, we pair a flow-matching boundary term with either of two consistency terms: the differential MeanFlow identity, whose target requires a Jacobian-vector product, or an equivalent semigroup loss that avoids it. Experiments on ACRONYM show that a single function evaluation of GraspMeanFlow reaches the EMD that an iterative SE(3) flow model needs five steps to approach, that a second instantiation of the same framework improves grasp success by up to 24.3 points in the few-step regime, and that both generate grasp distributions transforming exactly with the object.

Cross-embodiment dexterous grasping aims to synthesize stable grasps across heterogeneous multi-fingered hands with little or no embodiment-specific tuning. Existing interaction-centric methods achieve promising results, but their object representations often underrepresent local surface geometry, while their robot descriptors do not explicitly encode both robot morphology and kinematics. We propose MANGO-Grasp, an anisotropic interaction framework that represents objects as geometry-oriented 3D Gaussian primitives and robot hands as surface keypoints encoded into morpho-kinematic descriptors. The object primitives are adaptively allocated by geometric complexity and shaped as surface-aligned plates with outward normals, encoding local geometry. Mahalanobis fields over keypoint--primitive pairs serve as interaction prediction targets during training and as optimization guidance for grasp realization at inference. These fields rise sharply for displacement along the surface normal but only gently within the tangent plane, matching the directional structure of contact. Grasps are realized with one shared optimization formulation and hyperparameter setting across all embodiments. On the CMAP and MultiGripperGrasp benchmarks, MANGO-Grasp outperforms the strongest seen-hand baseline by up to 8.24 percentage points in simulation. It also transfers zero-shot to the unseen SharpaWave hand, improving over the strongest zero-shot baseline by up to 16.57 percentage points, and achieves 86% success in real-world experiments. The code and additional materials will be made available upon publication at https://connor-zh.github.io/MANGO-Grasp/.

Hand-object interaction (HOI) is a fundamental human behavior with broad applications in AR/VR, digital humans, and embodied interaction. Existing methods typically require predefined object geometry, object trajectories, or task-specific conditions, limiting their use with natural real-world inputs. To address this, we study a more practical problem of synthesizing 3D hand-object interaction sequences from a single RGB photograph and an open-vocabulary language instruction, and introduce PhotoHOI. PhotoHOI first uses a vision-language model to parse the input image and instruction into a structured task specification, including the interaction object, target region, and spatial relation. It then recovers a compact task-relevant 3D scene and plans a smooth collision-aware object trajectory based on the recovered object states, support relations, and surrounding scene geometry. To synthesize hand motion that generalizes to real-world photographs and unseen objects, it learns transferable task-conditioned contact and contact-conditioned grasp priors from large-scale affordance and HOI data. The grasp is further refined in a learned latent space, constraining the optimization to a plausible hand-pose manifold. Experiments on GRAB and H2O demonstrate improved contact quality and reduced penetration over representative baselines. Results on real-world photographs further demonstrate higher task success and scene consistency, together with generalization to unseen objects and open-vocabulary instructions.

Maintaining a stable pose during physical interaction is a significant challenge for aerial robots, often limiting their use in contact-based tasks. This paper presents a novel uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) platform designed to transition from unconstrained flight to a stable, constrained work platform via environmental anchoring. Our system comprises: 1) a multirotor with a tilt-rotor mechanism that decouples pitch from forward motion, enabling stable hover at non-zero pitch angles, and 2) a novel underactuated, cable-driven, prismatic gripper featuring compliance to adapt to irregular geometries, designed to stabilize the UAV by anchoring it to its environment. We present the design and prototyping of the complete system and validate its performance through a series of real-robot flight tests. Results demonstrate that anchoring significantly improves stability for interaction tasks, reducing positional drift RMSE by over 95% compared to a free-flight baseline, even under windy conditions. The anchored system can withstand longitudinal reaction forces up to 75N while maintaining a stable pose. Furthermore, across a range of target geometries and orientations, the system demonstrated consistent stability with a positional drift RMSE that never exceeded 3mm. These results establish the viability of our approach for complex physical interaction tasks, such as sampling tree health by drilling or sensor installation in hard-to-reach locations. Watch our UAV at: https://youtu.be/HDQ8S4ZW3Ls

Existing 6-DoF grasp detectors typically rank grasp candidates by detector confidence. However, our analysis on GraspNet-1Billion shows that detector confidence is often poorly aligned with grasp quality, leaving successful grasp candidates at low ranks. Motivated by this observation, we study whether learned re-ranking can improve candidate ordering while keeping detector parameters and grasp candidates unchanged. We propose GraRe, which estimates grasp quality from candidate attributes, shell-stratified local geometry, and object context. Candidate attributes condition the local geometric and object-context representations, and a Transformer fuses all three feature types. The predicted quality is combined with detector confidence to produce the final ranking. Experiments on GraspNet-1Billion with five frozen detectors show consistent improvements, with gains of up to 13.56 points in Average AP. Real-robot experiments further demonstrate robust grasping in cluttered scenes. These results show that improving candidate ranking provides a practical way to enhance frozen 6-DoF grasp detectors. Project code is available at \href{https://github.com/Minakanmi-Yuki/grare}{\textcolor{grarelink}{\texttt{\textit{https://github.com/Minakanmi-Yuki/grare}}}}.

Mainstream plan-then-track approaches to multifingered grasp execution entail selecting a grasp, planning a collision-free trajectory, and tracking the resulting trajectory via a feedback controller. Pose-estimation error during execution or scene motion can invalidate this open-loop commitment and trigger replanning. We thus present Grasp Distance Fields (GDFs), smooth softmin distances to finite sets of arm-hand grasp configurations. Using their negative gradients as feedback, we jointly select and execute grasps without planning a trajectory. A CBF-CLF quadratic program (QP) enforces self-collision, workspace, object, and obstacle-clearance constraints, while its CLF slack quantifies obstruction of task progress. We bound the softmin approximation error by $\log N/ρ$ and prove forward invariance of the filtered safe set. To handle changes in contact topology, we combine a hysteretic contact-mode transition with a wrench-quality CBF that limits degradation of the realized force-closure margin relative to hold onset. Using our method, a fixed-base manipulator and a Unitree G1 equipped with the same underactuated hand grasp and lift 46 of 50 test objects amid clutter and moving obstacles. The realized grasps also retain a median 94% of their synthesized quality margin, and each QP solve requires 0.09 ms within a 20 ms control interval. Project page: www.clintonenwerem.com/gdf.

Manipulating transparent laboratory glassware that contains liquid is inherently safety-critical: even small geometric errors can cause unstable grasps and hazardous spillage. Although recent progress has been made in transparent object perception and robotic grasping, most existing systems optimize detection, depth reconstruction, and grasp planning independently, which leads to cross-stage inconsistency imperfect boundaries induce depth bleeding, distorted surfaces corrupt normal estimation, and task agnostic grasp scoring yields tilted or off-center grasps that fail under dynamic motion. In this paper, we propose TransGraspNet, a geometry physics consistent framework that explicitly enforces consistency from perception to execution through three coupled principles: boundary consistency to produce structurally reliable object contours as downstream priors, surface consistency to preserve geometric fidelity and surface normal accuracy during depth reconstruction, and physics consistency to refine grasp selection with centroid alignment and wrench-space stability for upright and dynamically robust manipulation. We evaluate TransGraspNet on public benchmarks, a dedicated transparent glassware dataset, and a real robotic platform. The results show improved boundary quality and surface normal fidelity, and demonstrate strong task-level performance in cluttered transparent scenes. Most importantly, the proposed system achieves reliable real-world operation, including high grasp success rates in clutter and zero spillage during high speed liquid transport, highlighting the effectiveness of our method.

Geometry-based grasp planners ensure physically valid grasps but ignore functional semantics, often generating grasps that are antipodal and collision-free yet practically inappropriate, for example, gripping a mug by its rim, a knife by the blade, or a bottle near its cap. These inconsistencies cause the downstream task to fail even when traditional grasp metrics are met. Existing vision-language model (VLM) approaches either depend on fine-grained, category-specific part segmentation or attempt to directly infer grasp poses, with the latter prone to spatial hallucinations. As a result, no practical, training-free framework has yet been proposed that robustly links high-level semantic reasoning to geometric grasp planning. We introduce Semantic Affordance-Guided Grasp Planning (SAGP), a training-free pipeline built on a coarse-zone abstraction layer. The method first partitions the object point cloud into spatial regions (top, middle, bottom, lateral sides, and protrusions) by applying PCA-based alignment followed by distance-driven DBSCAN clustering, entirely bypassing learned segmentation. A pre-trained VLM then assesses the grasp quality of each region through a structured zero-shot query, and the resulting zone-wise scores are fused with geometric, reachability, and task-alignment signals to re-rank antipodal grasp candidates. Experiments on YCB objects in PyBullet with a Franka Panda robot show that SAGP preserves the high success rate of geometry-only planning while substantially improving the functional appropriateness of selected grasps, particularly on asymmetric, handle-bearing objects where geometry alone is uninformative. The introduced coarse-zone abstraction offers an effective, training-free bridge between VLM-based reasoning and geometric grasp planning, without the need for fine-grained part segmentation.

Machine learning for combinatorial optimization typically relies on neural constructors trained via reinforcement learning on large offline datasets for a fixed problem class-incurring high pretraining costs and generalizing poorly outside the training distribution. We propose an alternative: a metaheuristic framework that reformulates the randomized constructive phase of GRASP as an online imitation learning task, trained from scratch on each problem instance. A local search procedure acts as an expert oracle, while a decoder-only Transformer serves as the constructive policy. Unlike classical GRASP, which relies on static, myopic heuristic rules based on localized scalar costs, our approach is fully data-driven: the construction policy emerges from high-quality solutions discovered during the search itself, with no problem-specific feature engineering required. We instantiate this as LM-GRASP, a hybrid metaheuristic following an iterative learn-infer-improve cycle, training the policy online via behavioral cloning on a dynamic archive of elite trajectories-no external data or offline pretraining needed. The pipeline interfaces with the domain solely through the objective evaluator used by local search. Evaluated on the Taillard PFSP benchmark (ta51-ta60), the most discriminating block due to half its optima being unknown, LM-GRASP outperforms GPU-GRASP by 28.4 makespan units on average-comparable to the gain from GPU acceleration over sequential execution (27.2 units), though with overlapping standard deviations. This suggests instance-specific, online-trained language models are a promising, practical alternative to hand-engineered constructors, especially for landscapes resistant to classical greedy construction.

Humanoid robots increasingly require multi-modal understanding for natural interaction with humans. Despite the prominence of vision-language models, they generally assume textual rather than the more natural speech inputs. In this paper, we investigate whether a well-established text-conditioned model can be transferred to speech in a data-efficient manner. Using ALBEF as a case study, we conduct diagnostic analyses showing that a lightweight MLP-based projector effectively adapts it to speech, while preserving semantic discrimination and robustness. Motivated by these findings, we introduce Speech2Grasp, a framework for data-efficient transfer of text-conditioned grasp detection to speech. Real-world humanoid robot experiments show that Speech2Grasp outperforms cascaded ASR-based pipeline, while reducing inference latency. Our findings suggest a practical paradigm for extending established text-conditioned systems to speech.

Classical grasp quality metrics assume one deterministic friction coefficient and therefore cannot assess whether a grasp maintains force closure across plausible friction values. We present FIRMGrasp, a family of grasp quality metrics that incorporates friction uncertainty through Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). At confidence level $β$, we evaluate the force-closure margin at the mean of the adverse friction tail. This evaluation defines the risk-adjusted margin $\varepsilon^{(β)}$, the inscribed-ball radius of the corresponding grasp wrench space. We prove that $\varepsilon^{(β)}$ varies monotonically with $β$, remains differentiable in the grasp parameters, and certifies that any grasp with $\varepsilon^{(β)} > 0$ achieves force closure with probability at least $β$. Across 1,599 LEAP Hand and Allegro Hand grasps, $\varepsilon^{(β)}$ identifies friction-sensitive grasps that receive high nominal Ferrari-Canny scores, and 53% of the nominally force-closed grasps lose closure in the adverse friction tail. The nominal margin ranks a successful grasp above a failed grasp with probabilities of only 0.53 in the shake test and 0.67 in the pick test, whereas $\varepsilon^{(β)}$ achieves 0.63 and 0.78. At an adverse friction coefficient of 0.2, 70% of grasps with positive $\varepsilon^{(β)}$ withstand a simulated lift and lateral pull, compared with 25% of grasps with positive nominal margin and nonpositive $\varepsilon^{(β)}$. We also synthesize grasps with positive $\varepsilon^{(β)}$ for the RealHand L6 and LEAP Hand, both of which retain the object during adverse-friction lifts. In MuJoCo trials with the RealHand L6, 95% of grasps that establish contact and have positive $\varepsilon^{(β)}$ retain the object at the same adverse friction coefficient.

Brain-machine interfaces provide a link between neural activity and external devices, enabling restoration of motor function and advancing human-machine interaction using non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG). However, continuous grasp force decoding remains challenging due to complex temporal dynamics, high inter-subject variability, and limited generalisation of existing approaches. To address this, we propose a hybrid EEG decoding framework that jointly models continuous and tokenised representations, enabling capture of both fine-grained neural structure and long-range temporal dependencies. The proposed approach integrates convolutional-recurrent representation learning, quantisation-based tokenisation, and transformer-based temporal modelling within a unified fusion-based regression architecture. Experimental evaluation on the WAY-EEG-GAL dataset under strict leave-one-subject-out conditions achieves $R^2$ = 0.817 in offline settings and $R^2$ = 0.793 in simulated real-time evaluation, with latency suitable for real-time deployment. These results demonstrate strong cross-subject generalisation and highlight the practicality of hybrid continuous-tokenised representations for real-time EEG-based force decoding in assistive robotics, neuro-rehabilitation, and human-machine interaction.

Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) can assist individuals with limited mobility, such as stroke survivors or amputees. One of the key challenges in developing BMIs is expanding their usability and control, which can be achieved by accurately decoding multiple kinematic and kinetic parameters. To address this, we propose three regression models: partial least squares regressor, multilayered perceptron, and attention based regressor, to decode multiple movement parameters from EEG signals. We evaluated these models on the WAY EEG GAL dataset, focusing on their performance under subject specific and subject independent conditions with two strategies: a single model for all parameters and a baseline with separate models for each parameter. Among all regressors, the attention based regressor achieved the best performance, with an $R^2$ of 0.8 and a latency of 29.2 milliseconds, demonstrating significant improvement in simultaneous multi parameter decoding. However, its performance dropped for single parameter decoding. The multi layered perceptron showed more consistent but lower accuracy across both decoding types ($R^2$ = 0.49). These findings highlight the potential of attention based models for real time multi command BMI systems and contribute to the development of more intuitive control devices.

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.

Practical robotic grasping in complex scenes requires both 3D spatial reasoning and alignment with task-specific requirements. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer a natural way to specify these requirements using language, but existing approaches either use a VLM to predict the grasp directly with limited spatial awareness, or train the VLM together with the grasping model, which requires significantly more data and compute. These limitations impede performance and have prevented scaling to multiple embodiments in complex scenes. We address this by proposing SeededGrasp, a novel data-efficient framework that enables a VLM to predict a seed point to be used as conditioning for a subsequent lightweight grasp-generation model. Our architecture decouples high-level semantic reasoning from low-level geometric execution, enabling multi-embodiment support while bypassing the need for expensive end-to-end training. To enable training such models, we release the first multi-embodiment tabletop grasping dataset comprising over 2.5M grasps in cluttered scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing baselines, achieving 72% success in simulation and 78% in real-world grasping experiments. See our project site for data and code: https://uoft-isl.github.io/seeded-grasp/

Robotic grasping requires accurate coordination between visual perception, object localization, inverse kinematics, and hand control. However, when movements planned in simulation are executed on a physical robot, the sim-to-real gap can cause small positioning errors that prevent successful grasping. In our previous work, we introduced a low-cost haptic calibration method that improved 2D reaching accuracy of the humanoid robot NICO. In this paper, we extend this approach from reaching to tabletop object grasping by adding YOLO-based object and hand detection, stereo vision-based localization using the robot's built-in low-resolution fisheye cameras, and task-specific corrections for grasp execution. Together, these components form a novel calibration-based grasping pipeline that does not require RGB-D cameras, motion capture, or external tracking systems. We also implemented a visual feedback model that aligns the robot hand with the detected object before grasping. Our results show that the fully nonlinear calibration model achieved the best performance inside the calibrated area, while the visual feedback model achieved the highest overall grasping success across the full tabletop workspace.

Current bin picking methods that rely heavily on end-to-end learning often falter when confronted with unfamiliar or complex objects in unstructured environments. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Seg2Grasp, a modular pipeline designed for robust suction grasping in dynamic and cluttered bin scenarios. Seg2Grasp is built on a three-step process: Segmentation, Grasping, and Classification. The Segmentation module employs a Transformer-based model to generate class-agnostic object masks from RGB-D images, ensuring accurate detection across various conditions. The Grasping module uses surface normals and mask proposals to determine the optimal suction points, enhancing grasp success. Finally, the Classification module leverages fine-tuned open-vocabulary Mask-CLIP for precise object identification, enabling versatile handling of diverse objects. Real-world robotic experiments demonstrate that Seg2Grasp outperforms existing methods in success rates and adaptability, establishing it as a powerful tool for automated bin picking in industrial settings.

In robotic manipulation studies, grasping is often treated as a binary success or failure problem, usually defined by whether the object simply stays in the hand. For forceful tool use, however, this view is insufficient because grasp compliance becomes a critical factor governing how the hand and tool behave under load. Compliance arises from coupled kinematics, grasp configuration, passive mechanics, and contact conditions, producing nonlinear behavior in which deformation and interaction forces influence each other. Understanding this relationship is essential for predictive models of how a grasped tool and a compliant hand jointly respond to external loading. In underactuated hands, these effects are amplified: such designs offer low cost and adaptive grasping, but make compliance behavior more difficult to model and predict. Our goal is therefore to develop a predictive model for grasped tool behavior during forceful interactions. To address this challenge, we introduce an analytical model informed neural network (AMINN), a hybrid predictive model that combines an analytical mechanics layer with data driven learning to estimate grasp stability and in hand tool displacement under external loading. The model is evaluated on a three finger underactuated robotic hand and shows strong predictive capability with mechanically meaningful outputs across diverse loading conditions. Compared with a black box multilayer perceptron baseline, AMINN also achieves better energy based physical consistency. Beyond prediction accuracy alone, this framework advances physically interpretable learning for robotic manipulation and supports more reliable, safer, and more trustworthy autonomous tool use in safety critical settings during forceful interaction.

Soft robots have seen widespread adoption in interactive tasks due to their inherent compliance and adaptability. However, these advantages often come at the cost of stability, posing challenges in a dynamic environment. This limitation is especially critical in soft grippers, where instability under acceleration or external disturbances can result in grasp failure. In this study, we present a continuously stable structure through plastic deformation (CSSPD), integrated into a soft gripper. By leveraging the mechanism of plastic deformation, the gripper maintains continuous configurations without energy input, while the added stiffness ensures both static and dynamic stability. We introduce a bioinspired paw pad that significantly enhances stability and enables sensing-based rapid object grasping. Then we develop the mathematical model and optimize the kirigami structure of the metal layer. Experimental results show that the gripper can sustain a passive holding force of up to 16 N without energy input, achieving performance comparable to pneumatic actuation at 0.3 MPa. When combined with pneumatic actuation, it remains stable under pulsed accelerations of up to 400 m/s^2. It can also passively perch on tree branches for extended periods without power, demonstrating promise for mobile robotic applications.

This paper presents a scalable, open-source visuotactile sensing system for tensegrity robots that enables six-axis wrench estimation and contact detection. The proposed endcap sensor integrates an elastomeric shell, a 3D-printed thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) interface, and a rigid base housing an embedded camera and LED illumination ring. A novel gyroid-infill bonding technique is introduced to form a durable elastomer-TPU interface without adhesives, yielding a lightweight and modular design compatible with large-scale tensegrity structures. A tactile-to-wrench neural network maps shear vector fields to six-dimensional force and torque measurements. Experimental results demonstrate accurate and stable wrench estimation with a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.1531 on static validation data and out-of-domain generalization under dynamic motion. Furthermore, full-system integration on a 12 kg tensegrity robot confirms the sensor's ability to reliably identify ground contacts. The system substantially improves the practicality of tactile feedback for tensegrity robots, offering a low-cost, reproducible, and physically interpretable pathway toward contact-aware proprioception and state estimation. Open source files are available at \href{https://github.com/Jonathan-Twz/tensegrity-gelfoot}{github.com/Jonathan-Twz/tensegrity-gelfoot}

Direct hand-driven teleoperation maps an operator's hand motion to robot end-effector commands at every frame, enabling precise control, but it requires constant monitoring and correction during approach, grasp, and placement, which can be slow and fatiguing. For repetitive pick-and-place tasks, supervisory (goal-based) teleoperation simplifies this process: the operator specifies goals/waypoints, and the robot executes the motion using planning algorithms. Yet, this introduces latency, as the robot must wait for the next command before it can plan and act. "How can we reduce robot reaction time while lowering operator workload?" To tackle this question, we present AHEAD, a real-time VR teleoperation system that anticipates operator intent to enable proactive, hand-driven control. In a digital twin, the operator performs pick-and-place naturally, using hand motion to convey high-level commands rather than a continuous robot trajectory. AHEAD processes a short window of 3D hand and head signals together with scene context through an attention-based classifier to predict the intended grasp object and placement slot. A state machine converts intent predictions into stable robot goals, enabling early motion while remaining stable under noisy predictions and corrective hand movements. AHEAD's intent prediction module achieves Top1 accuracy: 76% for grasp objects and 76% for target slots. Moreover, our user study shows AHEAD reduces robot reaction latency by 0.6 s (object) and 1.4 s (slot) relative to baselines. Participants also reported lower operator load, indicating faster robot responses while maintaining low operator effort in practice.

Conventional robotic grippers face a significant challenge in agricultural automation: the trade-off between compliant, adaptive grasping, pressure balancing among all joints, and high load capacity, often at the cost of high energy consumption. This paper presents a novel hybrid rigid-soft gripper that integrated low-cost, membrane-based pneumatic actuators with 3D-printed dual ratchet-pawl mechanisms to simultaneously achieve shape adaptation, uniform force distribution, and energy-free self-locking. The dual-ratchet structure assembled in an offset configuration significantly increased the angular resolution of the joint locking mechanism. Key experimental results demonstrated the gripper's superior performance: a remarkable maximum load capacity of 4200 g, far exceeding that of conventional soft grippers (45-210 g); more uniform force distribution across object sizes (1.75-35.29% difference ratio) compared to a rigid gripper (56.77-66.44%), with peak contact forces remaining below surface damage thresholds; and a 50.05% reduction in total energy consumption to 42.6 J per grasp cycle, achieved by eliminating the need for continuous pneumatic pressure through the self-locking mechanism, compared to 85.28 J for a conventional soft gripper. The combination of additive manufacturing for ratchets and commercially available materials for pneumatic chambers ensured a low-cost and easily fabricated design. These findings validated that the proposed gripper successfully bridged the gap between soft compliance and rigid reliability, offering a robust and efficient solution for scalable agricultural harvesting and manipulation tasks.