Robotic Grasping

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37 papers in the last four weeks, up 270% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 192

Jul 10, 2026cs.RO

PhysV2A: Reachability-Gated and Semantic-Mask-Constrained Feasibility Completion for Video-to-Robot Manipulation

Video-based manipulation provides object-centric motion priors from human demonstrations, generated videos, or RGB-D observations, but such priors are typically embodiment-agnostic and cannot be directly executed by a specific robot. This paper presents \textbf{PhysV2A}, a reachability-gated and semantic-mask-constrained feasibility-completion framework for converting video-derived 6D object motion into robot-executable manipulation trajectories. The key idea is to treat grasp feasibility as trajectory-conditioned rather than local: each RGB-D-generated 6-DoF grasp candidate is rigidly coupled with the recovered object motion to form a grasp-conditioned TCP trajectory hypothesis. PhysV2A then performs hierarchical reachability-gated selection, where infeasible grasp--trajectory pairs are rejected by robot-centric kinematic checks and surviving candidates are ranked by downstream execution suitability. For the selected reachable trajectory, a VLM-assisted and rule-validated S-Mask identifies task-critical and relaxable Cartesian components, enabling semantic-mask-constrained manipulability refinement through redundancy-first optimization and bounded Cartesian relaxation. Real-robot experiments on four tabletop manipulation tasks show that PhysV2A improves task success over representative video-prior and IK-only baselines, reduces kinematic-feasibility failures, and produces better-conditioned trajectories with bounded semantic deviations.

Haohui Huang, Junda Duan, Tao Teng +1

Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China · University of Liverpool, Liverpool, U.K. · Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China

Trajectory Optimization Robotic Grasping Robotic Manipulation Dynamic Robotic Manipulation Robot Motion Planning

Jul 10, 2026cs.RO

Robot Trajectron V3: A Probabilistic Shared Control Framework for SE(3) Manipulation

We aim to address the challenge of teleoperating robotic arms for high-degree-of-freedom (high-DoF) manipulation tasks, which is cognitively demanding and error-prone, particularly when relying on low-bandwidth interfaces. We propose Robot Trajectron V3 (RT-V3), a probabilistic shared control framework designed for

SE(3)

grasping tasks. RT-V3 formulates shared control as Bayesian inference by learning a prior over user intent and combining it with real-time user commands to estimate the posterior intent distribution. The prior models user intent as a distribution over future trajectories conditioned on past robot dynamics and visual scene context. The intent prior is parameterized by a transformer-based conditional generative model that reasons over point clouds and candidate grasp poses, together with a factorized translation-rotation representation that improves learning efficiency in high-dimensional action spaces. During execution, RT-V3 continuously estimates the posterior distribution over future trajectories by combining the learned intent prior with a user-command likelihood derived from the observed control input, enabling continuous intent refinement and shared assistance. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that RT-V3 achieves high accuracy in trajectory prediction and competitive performance in reactive planning. Furthermore, real-world user studies indicate that RT-V3 significantly outperforms baseline methods in terms of success rate and efficiency, while substantially reducing the user's physical and mental workload.

Pinhao Song, Zhongxi Li, Ze Fu +2

KU Leuven, Dept. Mechanical Engineering, Research unit Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium. · KU Leuven, Dept. Electrical Engineering, Research unit Processing Speech and Images, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium.

Robotic Control Robotic Grasping Robot Teleoperation Trajectory Prediction

Jul 8, 2026cs.RO

Monocular Vision Based Control Framework for Grasping

Grasping in unstructured environments requires handling objects with widely different mechanical properties, from soft and deformable items to rigid everyday objects. Most existing approaches address these categories separately and often rely on tactile sensing, object-specific models, or specialized grippers. In this paper, we present a unified monocular vision-based grasping framework that targets both soft and rigid objects within a single control pipeline, using only RGB input and a position-controlled gripper. The proposed system combines open-vocabulary object detection, image segmentation, boundary-aware point assignment, real-time point tracking, and monocular depth estimation to recover object motion and geometry from visual observations. A key component of the framework is a language-based stiffness estimation model that infers an object's expected compliance from its semantic description and provides an object-level prior for selecting the grasping strategy before contact. For deformable objects, grasp adaptation is governed by a Procrustes-based dissimilarity measure computed from tracked keypoints, which acts as a visual proxy for deformation. For rigid objects, the gripper width is regulated through the scaling of tracked point distances. We validate the proposed method in real-world pick-and-place experiments on a Franka Emika Research 3 arm using objects with substantially different mechanical properties, including lettuce, fresh mozzarella cheese, croissants, paper towels, and hard plastic bottles. Results demonstrate that the framework achieves stable grasping across both soft and rigid objects using visual feedback alone, highlighting a practical, sensor-efficient, and generalizable approach for food handling and household manipulation.

Shail Jadav, Dongheui Lee

Autonomous Systems, Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien), Vienna, Austria · Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics (DLR), German Aerospace Center, Wessling, Germany

Robotic Grasping Deformable Object Manipulation Vision-Based Robot Control

Jul 8, 2026cs.RO

Continuous and large-scale: ELEANOR, the soft architected arm inspired by the elephant trunk

The elephant trunk is a dexterous and versatile manipulator whose performance is still unmatched in robotics. In previous works, modularity was prioritized and relatively small-scale continuum robots were built. We take the natural proboscis of the Loxodonta africana species as a model and propose a different design approach which favors structural continuity and dynamic properties that plausibly emulate those of the natural trunk, while conferring high adaptability to the environment and humans. Instead of targeting prescribed behaviors, we show that a biomimetic design based on the macroscopic properties of the natural system enables elephant-like movements and grasping. We build by 3D printing an 85 cm long, compliant, tapered, volumetrically tessellated continuum arm, which is combined with tendon-driven actuation mimicking the longitudinal and oblique muscles of the natural model. We demonstrate whole-body grasping of objects having different shapes and dimensions and discuss a comparison to the biological trunk highlighting aspects of both biology and robotics.

Giovanna A. Naselli, Anderson B. Nardin, Seonggun Joe +6

Soft BioRobotics Perception Laboratory, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, 16163 Genova, GE, Italy · Department of Autonomous Systems Engineering, Korea Aerospace University, Seoul, South Korea · Photocentric Ltd., Peterborough PE1 5XN, United Kingdom +2

Robotic Grasping Robotics Soft Robotics

Jul 7, 2026cs.RO

GraspIT: A Dataset Bridging the Sim-to-Real gap and back for Validated Grasping SE(3) Pose Generation

Robust robotic grasping of novel objects requires datasets that simultaneously provide photorealistic RGB-D observations, physically validated grasp quality annotations, and a principled bridge between simulation and the real world, which existing datasets lack to provide jointly. \textbf{GraspIT} addresses this gap: tabletop scenes in NVIDIA Isaac Sim are annotated via a four-stage physical slip-test on parallel Franka Panda instances, producing trajectory-reachability checks and continuous quality scores beyond force-closure.Of

{\sim}

2.3M candidates, 83% pass as \emph{good} (

s{\geq}0.50

); the 17% that passed force-closure but failed the slip-test provide graded hard negatives. A Real

\leftrightarrow

Sim loop back-projects these labels onto 100 real-world scenes. The release provides

{\sim}

316k annotated RGBD frame sets across 1035 sim and 100 real scenes, with instance masks, 6-DoF poses, physical object properties, and scored 6-DoF grasps. All tools are open-source and Docker-containerized. The trajectory planning within Isaac Sim further allows streaming of high resolution demonstrations for tabletop manipulation policy learning and behavior cloning.

Paul Koch. Adem Karakurt, André Sers

Fraunhofer IPK Pascalstraße 8-9, 10587 Berlin, Germany

Robotic Grasping Robotic Data Collection Sim-to-Real Transfer Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Robot Manipulation Benchmarks

Jul 6, 2026cs.RO

Closing the Reality Gap: Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Deployment for Dexterous Force-Based Grasping and Manipulation

Human-like dexterous hands with multiple fingers offer human-level manipulation capabilities but remain difficult to train the control policies that can deploy on real hardware due to contact-rich physics and imperfect actuation. We present a sim-to-real reinforcement learning method that leverages dense tactile feedback combined with joint torque sensing to explicitly regulate physical interactions. To enable effective sim-to-real transfer, we introduce (i) a computationally fast tactile simulation that computes distances between dense virtual tactile units and the object via parallel forward kinematics, providing high-rate, high-resolution touch signals needed by RL; (ii) a current-to-torque calibration that eliminates the need for torque sensors on dexterous hands by mapping motor current to joint torque; and (iii) actuator dynamics modeling with randomization to account for non-ideal torque-speed effects and bridge the actuation gaps. Using an asymmetric actor-critic PPO pipeline, we train policies entirely in simulation and deploy them directly to a five-finger hand. The resulting policies demonstrate two essential human-hand skills: (1) command-based controllable grasp force tracking and (2) reorientation of objects in the hand, both of which are robustly executed without fine-tuning on the robot. By combining tactile and torque in the observation space with scalable sensing and actuation modeling, our system provides a practical solution to achieve reliable dexterous manipulation. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of controllable grasping on a multi-finger dexterous hand trained entirely in simulation and transferred zero-shot on real hardware.

Zhe Zhao, Zhibin Li, Yilin Ou +1

State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China · University College London, United Kingdom

Robotic Grasping Dexterous Manipulation In-Hand Manipulation Sim-to-Real Transfer Robotic RL Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

Jul 6, 2026cs.RO

HUGS: Guiding Unified Dexterous Grasp Synthesis Across Modes and Scales via Learned Human Priors

Dexterous grasping across diverse object scales requires contact modes ranging from two-finger pinches to bimanual grasps. Existing dexterous grasp synthesis methods reduce the high-dimensional optimization space with manually designed expected contacts and initialization heuristics, which struggle to balance synthesis success rate and diversity. We present HUGS (Human-prior-guided Unified Dexterous Grasp Synthesis), a human-prior-guided framework for unified dexterous grasp synthesis across modes and scales. Instead of directly retargeting human demonstrations, HUGS learns an object-conditioned human prior that captures human grasp preferences and guides downstream force-closure-aware optimization. The prior is trained on a compact self-collected human grasp dataset with 1.8K grasps over 304 objects, providing broad coverage of object scales and contact modes. During synthesis, HUGS adaptively proposes contact modes and wrist initializations, substantially improving the balance between contact-mode coverage and synthesis success rate over heuristic-based methods. With HUGS, we synthesize 3.2M robotic grasps over 157K scenes, spanning object half-diagonal lengths from 2 cm to 30 cm and modes from two-finger to bimanual grasps. Models trained on the synthesized dataset autonomously select appropriate contact modes in the real world, enabling grasping from screws to large boxes.

Mingrui Yu, Yongpeng Jiang, Yongyi Jia +4

Tsinghua University

Robotic Grasping Dexterous Manipulation Bimanual Robotic Manipulation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics

Jul 3, 2026cs.RO

ROBOCYCLE: Autonomous Dual-Arm Robotic Manipulation and Coordination for Recycling Applications

As urban waste volumes escalate and labor shortages intensify, automated waste sorting systems are becoming a necessity. However, current robotic solutions often struggle with the 3D perception and manipulation of transparent, deformable, or cluttered objects. This work introduces ROBOCYCLE, an autonomous dual-arm robotic recycling platform designed to meet the recycling standards of the Tokyo metropolitan area. Our approach integrates multi-view RGB-D perception, transformer-based instance segmentation using RF-DETR, and 6-DoF grasp planning via the Anygrasp SDK. By processing segmentated point clouds, the system generates robust candidate poses for irregular and deformable waste. The system achieved a 90.3% grasp success rate and 84.3% overall task success rate, effectively performing complex coordinated tasks such as unscrewing PET bottle caps. The proposed platform offers a scalable solution for autonomous waste management in real-world human environments.

Rubén de J. Hilario-Cruz, Jesus A. García-González, Enrique Coronado +1

Tecnologico de Monterrey, School of Engineering and Sciences, Department of Computer Science, Ave. Eugenio Garza Sada 2501, Monterrey 64849, NL, Mexico. · National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) Tokyo Waterfront, 2 Chome-3-26 Aomi, Koto City, Tokyo 135-0064, Japan.

Robotic Grasping Bimanual Robotic Manipulation Robotics

Jul 3, 2026cs.RO

CoorGrasp: Coordinated Contact Control for Adaptive Dexterous Grasping Under Uncertainty

While recent research has focused heavily on dexterous grasp pose generation, less attention has been devoted to the execution of planned grasps. Under shape and position uncertainty, open-loop execution often yields uncoordinated contacts, causing undesired in-hand object motion and even grasp failures. To address this, this paper proposes a tactile-driven model predictive controller for adaptive and delicate execution of diverse dexterous grasps. Our approach emphasizes multi-contact coordination across both approaching and grasping phases, with three key novelties: (i) coordination-aware phase separation, (ii) arm-hand coordination to compensate for position errors, and (iii) adaptive force coordination to increase contact forces in a balanced manner. An analytical model is employed to relate contact forces to robot joint motions for predictive control. Our formulation imposes no restrictions on grasp types or contact configurations and integrates seamlessly with state-of-the-art grasp pose generation methods. We validate the approach through large-scale simulations involving 15k grasps across 478 objects on three robotic hands, and real-world experiments on 8 objects. Results demonstrate that our method achieves higher grasp success rates and reduced undesired object movements.

Mingrui Yu, Yongpeng Jiang, Yongyi Jia +2

Robotic Grasping Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Model Predictive Control Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

Jul 1, 2026cs.RO

From Technical Metrics to User Perception: A User Study of a Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction System for Object Detection and Grasping

Improvements in the technical performance of human--robot interaction (HRI) systems do not automatically translate into differences that human users can detect during live interaction. This paper investigates whether a 15 percentage point gain in end-to-end task success (from 75% in a multimodal baseline system to 90% in an improved configuration identified through a prior ablation study) is sufficient to produce consistent and measurable differences in user perception. The baseline system combines Whisper for speech recognition, Florence-2 for open-vocabulary object detection, LLaMA 3.1 for action extraction, and an interval Type-2 fuzzy logic controller for motion execution. The improved configuration replaces the perception and language modules with Grounding DINO + SAM and Qwen 3.5 9B, respectively, while retaining the same controller. A within-subject user study with 24 participants compared both systems on the same tabletop object-grasping task. After interacting with each configuration, participants rated perceived speed, reliability, and overall competence and fluency on a 7-point Likert scale. Results show that 17 out of 24 participants (70.83%) preferred the improved system (exact binomial test, p = 0.043, h = 0.43), and all three perceptual constructs were rated significantly higher for the improved configuration after Holm correction, with large to very large effect sizes (p < 0.001). These findings confirm that the identified technical improvements are perceptible to users in direct interaction and underscore the importance of complementing benchmark evaluation with user-centred evidence when assessing robotic manipulation pipelines.

Jian Song, Tian Zi, Shen Guanting

The authors are with the Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China.

Robotic Grasping Human-in-the-Loop Evaluation Human-Robot Interaction

Jun 30, 2026cs.AI

Agentic RAG-VLM: Affordance-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Self-Reflective Planning for Robotic Grasping

Generalizable robotic grasping in cluttered environments is essential for deploying manipulators in unstructured human spaces, yet existing VLM-based methods rely on visual similarity for object matching, neglecting physical affordances such as handle graspability and material fragility, and operate open-loop without spatial reasoning or failure recovery, limiting their effectiveness when objects are densely packed or physically diverse. We present Agentic RAG-VLM, a unified framework that bridges VLM-based semantic understanding and physically grounded grasp execution by integrating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with vision-language models (VLMs) and agentic self-reflective planning. Agentic RAG-VLM introduces three tightly coupled components: (1) a Hierarchical Affordance-Aware RAG (HAA-RAG) that encodes four-dimensional affordance descriptors, including type, material, fragility, and graspable region, and retrieves strategies by functional affordance compatibility rather than visual appearance; (2) a Scene Graph Constraint Reasoner that constructs spatial relationship graphs from VLM perception and translates proximity, occlusion, and support constraints into concrete grasp parameter adjustments; and (3) an Agentic Self-Reflective Pipeline with a 14-type failure taxonomy and three-level adaptive retry for closed-loop grasp refinement. Evaluated on a 12-task benchmark spanning single-grasp, interactive, and long-horizon scenarios with 360 trials per configuration, Agentic RAG-VLM achieves 78.3 percent overall success, a 53.3 percentage-point absolute gain over VLM-only baselines, demonstrating that affordance-aware retrieval, scene graph reasoning, and agentic recovery are jointly essential for robust manipulation.

Tao Chen, Lizheng Liu, Jiaxu Wang +4

Fudan University, Shanghai, China · Kean University

Robotic Grasping Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Generalization in Robotic Manipulation VLMs for Robotics

Jun 29, 2026cs.RO

From Grasps to Dexterity: Large-Scale Grasp Pretraining for Dexterous Manipulation

Large-scale dexterous grasp datasets encode rich priors over hand-object interaction, but their use has largely been confined to grasp generation and pick-and-place manipulation. We study whether such data can instead support functional dexterity in articulated tool use, where a robot must acquire a tool, maintain contact, and operate its functional moving parts. We adapt a hierarchical imitation learning framework that combines high-level hand sub-goal prediction with a low-level goal-conditioned controller. We construct a 355k-trajectory grasp-pretraining dataset from large-scale dexterous grasp annotations and use it to pretrain the low-level controller. The controller is then fine-tuned on downstream task demonstrations. To evaluate this setting, we introduce DexCraft, a simulation benchmark with six articulated tool-use tasks requiring coordinated finger motion. Across simulation and real-world experiments, our approach outperforms end-to-end diffusion policy baselines and hierarchical policies trained from scratch. In the real world, it improves full-task success by 33.3 percentage points over DP3. These results show that grasp datasets can serve not only as resources for grasp synthesis, but also as scalable pretraining data for contact-rich dexterous manipulation. Videos are shown on https://yingyuan0414.github.io/grasp2dexterity/ .

Ying Yuan, Xinyu Liu, Sriram Krishna +1

Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

Robotic Grasping Dexterous Manipulation Robotic Tool Use Imitation Learning Robot Manipulation Benchmarks Articulated Object Manipulation

Jun 29, 2026cs.RO

Grasp-Oriented Non-Prehensile Manipulation via Learning a Graspability Field

Non-prehensile manipulation is often used as a preparatory step for robotic grasping, yet existing approaches typically require a predefined target object pose. In practice, however, objects admit multiple graspable configurations and the desired pose is not known in advance. We reformulate non-prehensile manipulation for grasping as optimizing an object centric graspability objective rather than reaching a specific pose. We construct a graspable set from synthesized grasps and define a graspability field that measures how suitable an object configuration is for successful grasp execution. The scalar measure provides a dense learning signal for reinforcement learning and determines when to terminate manipulation. This yields a closed-loop manipulation-to-grasp pipeline driven by a single policy. Experiments in simulation and on a real robot show that the policy reliably reconfigures objects into graspable states and transitions to grasping without external planners or manually specified stopping conditions. The predicted graspability distance correlates with real world grasp success, which indicates that the learned representation captures grasp feasibility of object configurations.

Licheng Zhong, Gim Hee Lee

Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore

RL for Robotics Robotic Grasping Non-Prehensile Manipulation

Jun 29, 2026cs.CV

DCGrasp: Distance-aware Controllable Grasp Generation

Generating 3D hand-object interactions is essential for applications in robotics, XR, and synthetic data generation, where flexible controllability and strong generalization to diverse object geometries are required. However, existing methods rarely satisfy these requirements, limiting their practical applicability. We present DCGrasp, a distance-aware controllable grasp generation system built on a novel grasp energy term. This term computes Distance Profile, a signed distance from each hand vertex to the nearest object point, coupled with distance-aware weighting, effectively capturing the semantically similar hand-object interaction in near-contact regions while remaining invariant to object and hand identity. Given various controllable signals, DCGrasp first generates a Distance Profile based on a Diffusion Transformer, together with a corresponding candidate hand pose. We then refine the candidate pose through optimization, enforcing consistency between the optimized hand pose and the generated Distance Profile in near-contact regions. Our experiments show that DCGrasp produces high-quality, physically plausible grasps with flexible user control, generalizing to diverse object and hand shapes and scales. Our work establishes a robust and versatile pipeline for the synthesis of controllable 3D hand-object interactions.

Hiroyasu Akada, Jesús Pérez, Emre Aksan +6

Google · Max Planck Institute for Informatics, SIC

HOI Generation Robotic Grasping

Jun 26, 2026cs.RO

Learning Stable In-Grasp Manipulation in a Non-Dropping Action Space

Traditionally, dexterous manipulation controllers are designed using analytic models constrained by strong assumptions about the hand and the objects being manipulated. Reinforcement learning (RL) has become another common approach in which skills are explored openly in an end-to-end manner but is inefficient because of unnoticeable instability and conflicts in learning objectives. This paper attempts to efficiently explore stable and accurate manipulation skills by decomposing dexterous skills into multiple simpler/analyzable components. Each skill component is subsequently learned with constraints and guidance from classical physics and control theory. Our work shows that for stable grasp, in-grasp reposition/reorientation with different objects, sensor/motor noise, latency, and frictional conditions, skill learning becomes efficient and stable with prior knowledge from theory.

Ha Thang Long Doan, Hikaru Arita, Kazuto Nakashima +1

Robotic Grasping Dexterous Manipulation Robot Skill Learning In-Hand Manipulation Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Robotic RL

Jun 25, 2026cs.RO

Learning Motion Feasibility from Point Clouds in Cluttered Environments

Motion feasibility prediction plays a central role in robotics, particularly in task and motion planning and manipulation. A major bottleneck for this problem in cluttered environments is that infeasible planning attempts by Sampling-based motion planners (SBMPs) can incur substantial computational cost. Also existing approaches for infeasibility certification are limited to low-dimensional configuration spaces and often assume simplified geometric environments represented by primitive objects with known parameters. We study the complementary problem of learning motion feasibility prediction directly from raw RGB-D observations for a 7-DOF manipulator operating in realistic cluttered scenes. We introduce the first large-scale benchmark for this setting, comprising 2.7M grasp feasibility labels over 88 scanned objects and 190 cluttered tabletop scenes. We benchmark three representative classifier families spanning MLP- based, volumetric-CNN, and point-cloud-based Transformer architectures under matched training conditions. Our best model, GRASPFC-PTX (a point-cloud transformer), achieves an AUROC of 0.996 on Novel objects while providing predictions significantly faster than SBMPs.

Sajid Ansari, Arthi, Girish Varma +1

International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad Hyderabad 500032, India.

Robotic Grasping Point Cloud Learning Robot Manipulation Benchmarks

Jun 24, 2026cs.RO

DynaMOMA: Instantaneous Prediction of Grasp Poses for Mobile Manipulation of Dynamic Objects

Mobile manipulation is a fundamental robotics task and has advanced rapidly in recent years, enabling robots to navigate, reach, and interact with objects in complex environments. However, mobile manipulation of dynamic objects remains highly challenging, as robots must coordinate the mobile base and arm while adapting to continuously evolving target poses. A key challenge lies in predicting temporally consistent short-horizon grasp trajectories from dynamic observations. In this work, we propose \ours{}, a dynamic mobile manipulation framework that couples instantaneous grasp trajectory prediction with whole-body control policy. Our predictor uses an anchor-based diffusion model to generate temporally consistent short-horizon grasp trajectories conditioned on historical observations. The predicted trajectories are then encoded as compact features and fed to a whole-body reinforcement learning policy, which controls the mobile manipulator for dynamic grasping. We further introduce a anticipation-guided reward that equips the policy with an anticipatory grasping horizon by adaptively shifting the target from the current grasp observation to the instantaneously predicted grasp trajectory. Through extensive experiments in Isaac Gym simulation, we show that our method achieves strong performance in mobile manipulation of dynamic objects across diverse settings and grasping metrics. Furthermore, our predictor and policy demonstrate strong generalizability in real-world experiments.

Zhinan Yu, Junyan Xu, Jiazhao Zhang +9

National University of Defense Technology · CFCS, Peking University · Defense Innovation Institute, Academy of Military Sciences +2

RL for Robotics Robotic Grasping Mobile Robotics

Jun 23, 2026cs.RO

Grounding Generative Policies in Physics: Optimization-Guided Diffusion for Robot Control

Diffusion models sample effectively from high-dimensional, multimodal distributions, but their outputs may violate deployment constraints. For task-space robot policies, generated grasps, waypoints, or trajectories can be distributionally valid yet infeasible, violating reachability, collision-avoidance, or closed-loop executability requirements. This embodiment gap limits zero-shot deployment across robots, even when the task-space behavior itself is transferable. We propose an inference-time optimization framework that couples the behavior generation to physical feasibility by formulating diffusion guidance as a constrained optimization problem. Our key insight is to replace the sampling perturbation in the backward process with an optimized correction, allowing hard constraints or soft penalties to be imposed during sampling without the need to retrain the diffusion model, while keeping samples close to the learned prior. We evaluate the method on dexterous grasp synthesis with reachability and collision-avoidance constraints, and dynamic manipulation with controller-level trackability constraints. Across settings and robot embodiments, optimization-guided denoising matches the feasibility of projection- and gradient-guidance baselines while better preserving grasp quality, and improving controller-level executability and task success, with task success improving by up to 20pp. on dexterous grasping and 23pp. on visuomotor manipulation over the best baseline.

Sabrina Bodmer, René Zurbrügg, Tifanny Portela +5

ETH Zurich · EPFL

Diffusion Model Guidance Robotic Grasping Diffusion Sampling Diffusion Policy Robotic Manipulation

Jun 22, 2026cs.RO

AutoDex: An Automated Real-World System for Dexterous Grasping Data Collection

Learning robust dexterous grasping requires real-world data that records the physical outcomes of grasp attempts. Such data is hard to obtain at scale: teleoperation yields valid physical outcomes but is slow and operator-biased, while simulation-based generation is cheap and scalable but cannot certify contact validity. A natural solution is to generate candidate grasps and verify them on real hardware, but this scales only if the entire collection loop (perception, execution, labeling, and reset) runs without human intervention. We present AutoDex, an automated real-world data-collection system that closes this loop: for each candidate from a replaceable generator, it localizes the object under severe hand-object occlusion with dense 20-camera perception, executes collision-monitored robot motions, labels lift-and-hold success or failure, and actively resets the object between trials to expose additional candidates across stable poses. The result is a reusable database of physically labeled grasp trials that downstream systems can query by retrieval and feasibility filtering. Using AutoDex, we collect 3,593 grasp trials across Allegro and Inspire hands on 100 diverse objects, with synchronized multi-view observations and robot-state logs. For a matched 500-trajectory collection, AutoDex requires 10.3 h versus 49.4 h for teleoperation, yielding a 4.8x throughput improvement, and grasps retrieved from the AutoDex-validated database succeed 76% versus 34% for simulation-only validation. Code and data will be publicly released.

Mingi Choi, Gunhee Kim, Jisoo Kim +4

Seoul National University · RLWRLD

Robotic Grasping Robotic Data Collection Robotics

Jun 19, 2026cs.RO

A Human-Inspired Thumb-Index Robotic Hand with Strain Gauges Embedded in Soft Joints

Human hand grasp adaptation depends mainly on the synergy between physical structure and biological feedback. Inspired by this biomechanical principle, the Safe Thumb-Index Robotic (STIR) Hand was developed as a minimal, lightweight, and low-cost two-digit prototype featuring an asymmetric thumb-index configuration. By pairing an underactuated, tendon-driven mechanical design with flexible strain gauges embedded into silicone-encapsulated soft joints, the system achieves passive grasp adaptation while establishing both internal proprioception and external perception. Unsupervised analysis was carried out on a dataset of the STIR hand grasping 20 different objects, along with an object classification task and an ablation study to highlight the contribution of the soft joint sensors. The object classification task discriminated object size, shape, and material stiffness with a high classification accuracy. In contrast to traditional industrial grippers and robotic hands, the STIR Hand demonstrates that sensorized compliant joints significantly improve overall sensitivity and ensure safe grasping, while remaining independent of additional fingertip tactile elements or external vision systems. Finally, a comparison to similar devices grasping identical objects validates the utility of the STIR Hand.

Jonas Papenbrock, Shubhan Patni, Tomaso Lisini Baldi +4

Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics - University of Siena. · Department of Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague

Robotic Hand Design Robotic Grasping Robotic Tactile Sensing Robotic Perception

Jun 19, 2026cs.RO

Pose-Agnostic Robotic Functional Grasping via Observation-Action Canonicalization

Functional robotic grasping requires a policy that generalizes across diverse object geometries and poses while maintaining task-specific contact precision. We study this challenge through mug-handle grasping, where thin handles, instance variation, and upright or inverted placements make both perception and control sensitive to object configuration. Grasp pose detection methods operate open-loop and are sensitive to estimation errors on thin handle structures. Learned visuomotor policies must implicitly learn to handle the coupled variation in visual appearance and action direction induced by different object placements, limiting generalization. We propose AnyMug, a canonicalized visuomotor reinforcement learning framework for functional grasping that trains a single closed-loop policy entirely in simulation and deploys it zero-shot on a real robot. AnyMug introduces observation-action canonicalization, which transforms both the depth observation and the predicted end-effector action into a shared object-centric frame. The policy therefore sees a consistent mug-centered view and emits actions in a canonical direction regardless of mug placement, allowing the same grasping behavior to be reused across configurations. A handle-aware reward further encourages precise approach, gripper alignment, and opposing-finger placement, while a pose curriculum and domain randomization improve training stability and sim-to-real transfer. In simulation, AnyMug achieves over 93% success rate on both unseen upright and inverted mugs and transfers zero-shot to a real Franka Panda, reaching 80% success rate on 5 held-out physical mugs across both pose categories.

Le Qiu, Cole Harrison, Jiankai Sun +5

Tsinghua University · Amazon · Stanford University +1

RL for Robotics Robotic Grasping Generalization in Robotic Manipulation Visuomotor Policy Learning Robot Policy Generalization

Jun 19, 2026cs.RO

R2HandoverSim: A Simulation Framework and Benchmark for Robot-to-Human Object Handovers

We present R2HandoverSim, a simulation benchmark for robot-to-human (R2H) object handovers. Although R2H handover methods have advanced rapidly, the lack of standardized evaluation protocols impedes objective comparison. Our benchmark enables reproducible evaluation by systematically comparing four baselines on their predicted shared grasp poses. We conduct a user study with 30 participants, analyze baseline performance, and show that simulation results correlate with real-world evaluation outcomes. Crucially, five complementary metrics (planning feasibility, reachability, grasp stability, grasp affordance, and safety) better reflect user-perceived handover quality than overall success rate alone. Website and code: https://robot-future.github.io/r2handoversim/.

Hanxin Zhang, Abdulqader Dhafer, Hongbiao Dong +1

DANiLab, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK · School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK · School of Metallurgy and Materials, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

Robotic Grasping Robotics Simulation Robot Manipulation Benchmarks Human-Robot Interaction

Jun 18, 2026cs.RO

Belt-Finger: An Affordable Soft Belt-Driven Gripper for Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation

Parallel-jaw grippers are the default manipulator choice in robotics because they are simple, robust, and inexpensive. Their limited in-hand mobility, however, often forces large arm motions and restricts dexterous manipulation in confined workspaces. We present a parallel-gripper upgrade: a double-soft-belt-based finger module that preserves standard opening/closing while adding three in-hand degrees of freedom (DoF): translation, pitch, and roll. The mechanism is deliberately kept simple and engineered for inexpensive manufacturing and straightforward integration, preserving the reliability and precise control of traditional parallel grippers while greatly broadening the range of manipulation capabilities. To demonstrate the utility of the added DoFs, we integrate the gripper in two control pipelines. First, we adapt a model predictive controller for in-hand manipulation of known objects. Second, we introduce a lightweight teleoperation interface that enables simultaneous control of the robot arm and gripper (10 DoFs total) with minimal hardware. Across a suite of challenging manipulation tasks executed via teleoperation, MPC, and trained policies, the proposed gripper consistently improves dexterity and task feasibility compared to a conventional parallel gripper

Boya Zhang, Andreas Zell, Georg Martius

Department of Computer Science, University of Tübingen, Germany · 2Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Germany

Robotic Grasping Dexterous Manipulation In-Hand Manipulation Soft Robotics

Jun 17, 2026cs.RO

GCNGrasp-VP: Affordance-Guided View Planning for Efficient Task-Oriented Grasping

Task-oriented grasping performance degrades significantly when object views suffer from occlusions. Existing task-oriented grasping methods typically assume task-relevant regions are visible in the initial frame, while view planning approaches enable active perception but often ignore task semantics and rely on time-consuming scene reconstruction. To address these limitations, we present GCNGrasp-VP, an efficient framework integrating affordance field prediction with active view planning. Central to this framework is GCNGrasp-v2, a task-oriented grasp model that simultaneously supports grasp evaluation and affordance field prediction, achieving constant-time inference complexity. Leveraging this capability, our Affordance-guided View Planner (Affordance-VP) utilizes the affordance field as an information gain metric to guide camera observation of task-relevant regions without requiring scene reconstruction. View planning results show that our method significantly outperforms scene-uncertainty-driven baselines with only one view adjustment. Real-world validation further confirms substantial improvements in grasp success rates for single-object scenarios while maintaining millisecond-level computational latency. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Instinct323/GCNGrasp-VP.

Zanjia Tong, Wenlong Dong, Chengjie Zhang +1

Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Robotics and Computer Vision, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China.

Robotic Grasping Next-Best-View Planning

Jun 16, 2026cs.RO

EAGG: Embodiment-Aligned Grasp Generation via Geometry-Aware Graph Conditioning

Cross-end-effector grasp generation seeks a unified model that generalizes across objects and across embodiments ranging from parallel grippers to dexterous end effectors. Existing grasp generators are typically designed for a fixed embodiment or encode embodiment identity with a static descriptor, which weakens transfer when topology, actuation coupling, and contact geometry differ substantially. We present EAGG, an embodiment-aligned grasp generator that represents each embodiment with a topology-aware end-effector graph and an embodiment-specific low-dimensional end-effector control space. A frozen end-effector-cognition backbone converts the current articulated state into geometry-aware tokens that act as a reusable morphology prior, and iterative geometry injection refreshes these tokens throughout sampling so that conditioning remains synchronized with the evolving end-effector geometry. On the MultiGripperGrasp benchmark, EAGG reaches 56.17% average success across six training end effectors, remaining within 1.10 percentage points of specialized training while preserving transfer to finetuning and zero-shot end effectors. Iterative geometry injection further reduces the pooled median contact distance from 0.239 cm to 0.189 cm. These results show that cross-end-effector grasp generation is strengthened by aligning embodiment structure inside a shared generator rather than suppressing embodiment differences. Code is available at https://github.com/wanhaoniu/EAGG.

Wanhao Niu, Qiyan Ke, Yuan Sun +5

Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Beijing Moce Future Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing, China

Robotic Grasping Generalization in Robotic Manipulation Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning

Jun 16, 2026cs.RO

A Hybrid Optimization Framework for Grasp Synthesis under Partial Observations

We propose a hybrid grasp synthesis framework that combines a learning-based Energy-Based Model (EBM) with an analytical Iterative Closest Point (ICP) method to generate robust grasps from partially observed point clouds. The learned energy function acts as a prior within a Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) framework, guiding iterative refinement of grasp configurations. Evaluated on 67 objects with 5,360 grasp attempts, our method achieves an average success rate of 60.9%, outperforming AnyGrasp (31.1%) and Grasp Pose Detection (48.4%) and AS-ICP (56.6%). These results highlight the strong generalization ability of our approach and demonstrate how combining data-driven learning with geometric optimization addresses the limitations of either strategy in isolation.

Wenzheng Zhang, Fahira Afzal Maken, Tin Lai +1

School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, Australia · Data61, CSIRO, Australia · NVIDIA, USA

Robotic Grasping Point Cloud Learning

Jun 16, 2026cs.RO

DexLink Hand: A Compact, Affordable, 16-DOF Linkage-Driven Hand with Human-Like Dexterity

Dexterous robotic hands face a longstanding trade-off among dexterity, compactness, and affordability. Particularly, high-degree-of-freedom designs typically demand complex actuation and transmission, hindering integration into human-scale forms. To address these challenges, this work presents a compact, low-cost linkage-driven anthropomorphic hand that achieves high dexterity, structural integration, and human-hand-like functionality. The hand integrates 20 joints driven by 16 independent actuators, with all actuation, sensing, and transmission components compactly embedded within a human-hand-sized structure. The resulting prototype weighs only 320g at a total cost below USD 400. To meet these objectives, a hybrid mechanical architecture combining planar and spatial linkage mechanisms is proposed, enabling decoupled multidirectional motion, biomimetic joint synergies, and high passive load-bearing capability. The thumb further incorporates biomimetic features supporting human-like reconfiguration and opposition movements. Through the coordinated integration of these mechanisms and structural layout, the prototype achieves a highly integrated design with anthropomorphic dexterity. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the hand achieves the maximum Kapandji score, reproduces all 33 Feix grasp types, and performs stable grasping and dexterous manipulation across a wide variety of daily objects and tools. These results validate the proposed hand as an affordable, compact, and mechanically efficient platform for dexterous manipulation, teleoperation, and robot learning in human-centered environments.

Hao Wu, Yanzhe Wang, Yu Feng +4

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. · Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

Robotic Hand Design Robotic Grasping Dexterous Manipulation

Jun 15, 2026cs.RO

Human Universal Grasping

Humans can grasp objects effortlessly, whereas multi-fingered robots are far from this level of generality. We argue that the most natural source of robot grasping data is from humans, who pick up thousands of objects every day. We present HUG, a flow-matching model that generates diverse human grasps for any user-specified object in a single RGB-D image captured from a stereo camera. Using smart glasses, we first collect 1M-HUGs, an egocentric dataset of human grasps spanning 1M frames (27.8 hrs) and 6,707 object instances across 41 buildings. Next, to model the distribution of natural human grasps, our novel flow-matching model fuses RGB and depth observations to output a grasp parameterized by wrist translation, wrist rotation, and MANO hand pose. Predicted grasps can be retargeted to various robot hands, enabling zero-shot grasping in everyday scenes. To standardize evaluation, we build a new simulated benchmark, HUG-Bench, of 90 unseen objects from five geometric categories and various sizes, with metric-scale 3D meshes. We evaluate HUG in the real world on the 30-object test set of HUG-Bench across multiple stereo cameras, robot embodiments, and household environments. HUG outperforms the state-of-the-art grasping baselines by +23% and +34% on our challenging object set. Code, data, benchmark, checkpoints, and an interactive demo are released on our website: https://grasping.io/

Kevin Yuanbo Wu, Tianxing Zhou, Isaac Tu +5

New York University · Tsinghua University · University of Michigan

HOI Generation Robotic Grasping Generalization in Robotic Manipulation

Jun 14, 2026cs.RO

Transferring Contact, Not Just Motion: Compliant Grasping Across Dexterous Hands

Dexterous grasping depends on contact regulation, not motion alone. Stable manipulation requires fingers to maintain appropriate object loading as contacts slip, deform, or become visually occluded. Existing cross-embodiment dexterous policies unify motion through retargeted hand poses or latent actions, but force feedback remains tied to each hand's sensing and actuation, limiting transfer. This work introduces a cross-embodiment force-position interface for contact-aware manipulation across heterogeneous dexterous hands. Motion intent is represented in a shared hand-pose latent, while each hand's effort signal is calibrated through system identification into physical joint torque in N.m. These torques are mapped to fingertip forces and compact per-finger load descriptors, giving the policy comparable observations of where the hand should move and how the object is loaded. Using this interface, a flow-matching visuomotor policy is trained on vision, proprioception, and calibrated contact, with structured visual masking that encourages reliance on force under grasp-relevant occlusion. The same calibrated signal drives a hybrid force-position controller for demonstration collection and execution, keeping force targets consistent across training and deployment. Experiments across structurally different hands show that calibrated contact feedback enables transferable compliant grasping, with learned primitives reusable in long-horizon manipulation pipelines.

Soofiyan Atar, Yao-Ting Huang, Michael Yip

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of California San Diego, United States

Robotic Grasping Dexterous Manipulation Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Cross-Embodiment Transfer

Jun 12, 2026cs.RO

SyLink Hand: A Synergy-Inspired Linkage-Driven Anthropomorphic Hand for Human-Like Dexterity

Designing anthropomorphic robotic hands that balance functional dexterity with mechanical simplicity remains a significant challenge. Inspired by human hand synergies, this paper presents the SyLink Hand, an anthropomorphic dexterous hand that integrates biomechanical synergy principles with linkage-driven transmission mechanisms to achieve a high degree of anthropomorphism in appearance, kinematics, and functionality within a compact and cost-effective architecture. Biomechanical analysis of natural hand motions using motion capture gloves reveals strong kinematic correlations among hand joints, providing the basis for a simplified yet functional degree-of-freedom (DOF) configuration. Guided by these synergistic characteristics, optimized linkage mechanisms are employed to coordinate multiple joint motions and reproduce natural finger trajectories. A novel spherical four-bar linkage is further proposed to achieve decoupled flexion/extension (Flex/Ext) and abduction/adduction (Abd/Add) at the metacarpophalangeal joint within a compact form factor. The resulting prototype integrates 19 joints driven by 11 actuators, with a total mass of 520g and a manufacturing cost of approximately USD 400. Experimental evaluations demonstrate its human-like kinematic performance, high load-bearing capability, and versatile grasping and manipulation skills. These results validate that the synergy-inspired, linkage-based design effectively balances anthropomorphism, mechanical simplicity, and functional versatility, highlighting its potential for practical deployment in dexterity-demanding robotic applications.

Hao Wu, Yanzhe Wang, Yu Feng +4

Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore. · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.

Robotic Hand Design Robotic Grasping Robotic Manipulation