Home

Full-day workshop, May 19 2025, ICRA 2025

Room 302, Building A, Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta, GA, USA

Multi-fingered robotic hands hold immense potential for flexible manipulation in human environments. From using tools like scissors to preparing food, handling cloth, and robustly tying shoelaces, many mundane activities are enabled by or become more flexible with additional degrees of freedom, allowing for in-hand manipulation and dexterous environment interaction. With the ongoing waves of advancement in artificial intelligence, learning techniques, robust teleoperation, the proliferation of affordable tactile sensors, and the expansion of diverse datasets, we are closer than ever to overcoming major existing challenges and unlocking unprecedented levels of dexterity in robotic manipulation.

However, we also acknowledge the current state of research: In practical applications, multi-fingered hands usually demonstrate a lower grasping and manipulation success rate compared to two-fingered parallel grippers; more robotic datasets and benchmarks focus on grippers than on multi-fingered hands; and two-jaw and suction grippers already serve a wide range of industrial applications.

In light of these challenges, this workshop is dedicated to exploring a critical question: how can we overcome the challenges of dexterous manipulation and unlock the potential of multi-fingered hands?

This workshop intends to answer this question in four key aspects:

Investigating Manipulation Limitations: Understanding the constraints linked to mechanical design and control
Examining Advanced Algorithms: Reviewing state-of-the-art algorithms for dexterous manipulation
Enhancing Dexterity and Adaptability: Exploring new paradigms to improve the dexterity and adaptability of robotic hands
Envisioning the Future: Considering how foundation models may revolutionize dexterous manipulation

The objective of this workshop is to foster collaboration among researchers at all career stages with a strong interest in robotics, artificial intelligence, control theory, mechanical design, and related fields. The workshop promises rich dialogue among leading experts from both academic and industrial backgrounds. Accepted papers will be presented in poster sessions and contributed talks.

Through these events, participants will gain insights into the latest breakthroughs and collaborative opportunities, setting the stage for future innovations in dexterous manipulation.

Recordings and Hightlights

Our whole workshop recording is here.

Invited Speakers

listed alphabetically

Antonio Bicchi

Full Professor

University of Pisa, IIT

Aude Billard

Full Professor

EPFL

Oliver Brock

Full Professor

Technical University Berlin

Ankur Handa

Principal Research Scientist

NVIDIA

Josie Hughes

Assistant Professor

EPFL

Tengyu Liu

Research Scientist
BIGAI

Lerrel Pinto

Assistant Professor

New York University

Shuran Song

Assistant Professor

Stanford University

Xiaolong Wang

Assistant Professor

UC San Diego

Industry Session

listed alphabetically

The workshop will also feature an industry session where companies will present their innovative products, pioneering applications, and insights on the future of dexterous manipulation. Companies will showcase their research and products during the interactive session to provide opportunities for an extended Q&A with the participants. We are also pleased to spotlight four startup companies: XELA Robotics, Fluid Reality, Sensible Robotics, and Allonic.

Accepted Abstracts

All peer-reviewed accepted abstracts are available through OpenReview.

Best Poster Awards! 🎉

Three best poster awards for the best-extended abstract reflect both the quality of the abstract, as well as the quality of the presentation and the poster interaction. Agile Robots & Franka Robotics proudly sponsor $500 prize award per award!
Entries were highly competitive and the final winners were hard to choose. Congratulations to the three winners in no particular order!

Hung-Jui Huang, Michael Kaess and Wenzhen Yuan, NormalFlow: Fast, Robust, and Accurate Contact-based Object 6DoF Pose Tracking with Vision-based Tactile Sensors.

Anya Zorin, Irmak Guzey, Billy Yan, Aadhithya Iyer, Lisa Kondrich, Nikhil X. Bhattasali and Lerrel Pinto, RUKA: Rethinking the Design of Humanoid Hands with Learning.

Vatsal V. Patel and Aaron Dollar, Not Twisting Your Arm: Combining Grasping and Rotation in a Single Robot Hand Mechanism.

Call for abstracts 📜

We solicit extended abstracts up to 4 pages (excluding references and supplementary material). Submissions can include original research, dataset or benchmark design, applications and literature reviews that bridge the research areas pertinent to this workshop. Submissions will be externally peer-reviewed by two experts and rated based on technical content and their ability to positively contribute to the workshop.

All accepted contributions will be presented in interactive poster sessions. Each contribution will be provided with 4'x4' poster space (1.22mx1.22m) for their presentation. All posters should be set up by the first poster session at 10:10am and kept up until the end of the workshop.

A subset of 10 accepted contributions will be featured in the workshop as 3-minute spotlight presentations. Spotlight presenters are contacted separately by email.

Submission is managed through OpenReview.