Generating Robot Hands from Human Demonstrations
Robot learning has advanced rapidly in learning control, but learning the physical body of a robot remains much more difficult because jointly searching over design and control creates a very large combinatorial problem. Here, we present a data-driven framework for generating robot hands from human demonstrations. Instead of learning a complex controller together with each candidate design, we generate robot hand designs using the same simple control policy used after fabrication: matching fingertip positions through inverse kinematics. Using more than 4 million frames of human fingertip motion from everyday manipulation, our algorithm optimizes tree-structured robot hands to reproduce desired target motions. The framework produced both a 6-degree-of-freedom (DoF) general-purpose hand and lower-DoF task-specific hands with spatial four-bar mimic joints. To accelerate the search over designs, we trained a reinforcement-learning (RL) actor to propose good hand designs and joint angles, r
Generating Robot Hands from Human Demonstrations Sha Yi 1 Nicklas Hansen 1 Xueqian Bai 1 Carmelo Sferrazza 2 Michael T. Tolley 1 Xiaolong Wang 1 1 University of California San Diego 2 Amazon Frontier AI & Robotics Abstract Robot learning has advanced rapidly in learning control, but learning the physical body of a robot remains much more difficult because jointly searching over design and control creates a very large combinatorial problem. Here, we present a data-driven framework for generating robot hands from human demonstrations. Instead of learning a complex controller together with each c
Explore this link on the map →related reading
- GENE-26.5: Advancing Robotic Manipulation to Human Levelgenesis.ai
- State of Robot Learning, December 2025vedder.io
- A Mathematical Introduction to Robotic Manipulationatc.home.ece.ust.hk
- OSMO: Open-Source Tactile Glove for Human-to-Robot Skill Transferarxiv.org
- The Case Against Human Handsvedder.io
- Robotic arm - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
- 2412.02676arxiv.org
- Robotic Manipulationmanipulation.mit.edu
- Learning dexterity | OpenAIopenai.com
- [2304.13705] Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardwarear5iv.labs.arxiv.org
- Robot Dexterity Still Seems Hard - by Brian Potterconstruction-physics.com
- Ch. 1 - Introductionmanipulation.csail.mit.edu