Mana: Dexterous Manipulation of Articulated Tools
Zhao-Heng Yin, Guanya Shi, Pieter Abbeel, C. Karen Liu
A coarse-to-fine sim-to-real pipeline trains dexterous robot hands to grasp and manipulate articulated tools — objects with internal joints like scissors, pliers, or spray bottles — without task-specific data collection. The system generates grasp keyframes procedurally, then uses motion planning and RL to produce full manipulation trajectories, requiring under a minute of human input per tool to specify functional affordances. Tested across four articulated tools with varying joint types and scales, it achieves zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on a physical dexterous hand.
Zero citations and no functional code repos yet — the references are all paper-tracking aggregators. The work is very recent (June 2026) and comes from Abbeel and Liu's groups, so it will attract attention, but there's no production traction or open-source implementation to evaluate at this point.
Articulated tool manipulation remains a major challenge in dexterous robotics due to the need to coordinate internal degrees of freedom and contact-rich interactions. While prior work has largely focused on rigid objects, articulated tool use remains underexplored because of its physical complexity and the difficulty of learning functional grasping and manipulation policies. We present Mana (Manipulation Animator), a general sim-to-real framework that reinterprets dexterous manipulation as an animation problem. Inspired by computer animation, Mana employs a coarse-to-fine pipeline that transforms procedurally-generated grasp keyframes into manipulation trajectories through motion planning and reinforcement learning. The data generation process is largely automatic, requiring only a few mouse clicks to specify functional affordances (<1 minute per tool). Across four articulated tools spanning different scales and joint types, Mana achieves zero-shot sim-to-real transfer for both grasping and in-hand manipulation, demonstrating a scalable approach to dexterous articulated tool use.