Robot manipulation
Robotic systems performing grasping, object handling, and assembly tasks. Every Robotics Weekly story on robot manipulation, newest first. 32 stories since September 2026.
- Reflex lets a Unitree G1 catch boxes people throw at it
The headline 85.7% catch rate is in simulation. On hardware, the robot caught 8 of 20 throws aimed to the side.
- EigenDEXplore explores a 20-DOF hand like a human hand
Harsh Gupta swaps per-joint random noise for coordinated patterns learned from human hands, and Jeannette Bohg and Shuran Song both amplified it.
- RPG robot watches one demo, practices in sim, goes 30 for 30
A real-to-sim-to-real pipeline that rebuilds the task in simulation, practices it, and updates a shared skill set from its own failures.
- Researchers pick apart Atlas's new 13-DOF hands
Chris Paxton says the fingers are bigger than a human's and there is one fewer of them, and Yifan Hou says you could not puppet these moves by hand.
- Digit ran 12 hours of autonomous tote picking at IROS
Chris Paxton says the Agility Robotics humanoid worked a previously unseen booth at 1x speed, with roughly 500 teleoperated demos behind the policy.
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One email a day. Under three minutes. The demos, the deployments and the part the press release left out.
- Dyna's uncut laundry hour still has a dryer timer question
Dyna Robotics called the hour-long laundry run uncut, and the sharpest reply to it is still sitting there unanswered.
- Paxton says model-based control has no future
A question about what RL adds over inverse kinematics turned into a call to drop online optimization altogether.
- EyeRobot 2.0 swaps wrist cameras for active gaze
Justin Kerr asks whether the cameras bolted to almost every bimanual robot are actually necessary.
- Digit ran mobile manipulation for 12 hours at IROS
Chris Paxton says the end-to-end whole body demo on an Agility Robotics Digit was 1x speed, autonomous, and in a room the robot had never seen.
- RL vs IK debate narrows to whose model is cruder
Qiayuan Liao, Roei Herzig and Kevin Zakka traded arguments about whether a learned policy or a classical controller is the one making bad assumptions.
- Dyna put Taku to work in a live server room
An employee account with raw phone photos, no success rates.
- Chestnut pairs an 18-DOF hand with a matching capture rig
The wearable exoskeleton logs per-joint angles to 0.1 degrees, so human data lands in the same action space as the robot hand.
- Reality Check launches with 14,400 real robot rollouts
A public leaderboard for robot manipulation, run on real hardware rather than in simulation.
- Berkeley turns one human demo into a policy for any robot hand
Jitendra Malik, a collaborator on the work, used it to ask whether teleoperation is still needed.
- Humanoid Scott says the hand video still has an AI tell
A clip posted with the caption "It's over" gets a frame-by-frame rebuttal from one account, and nobody else has checked the call.
- Do as I Do turns plain video into robot hand data
A retargeting algorithm aimed at the part of dexterity data that usually breaks, physical validity.
- FANUC cobot takes spoken commands, trained before the arm existed
Lukas Ziegler says the team built the policy against a digital twin because the physical hardware was not available yet.
- Chelsea Finn asks what robotics' RLHF moment looks like
A new blog post argues reliability, not capability, is what stands between robot demos and robots people trust.
- Berkeley and Siemens release ARLI, RL for laggy robot models
E Harrison posted the method, with Sergey Levine and Andrew Wagenmaker both amplifying it the same day.
- Astra hits 79% on RoboMME at 3.63 calls per episode
A three-tier stack puts a frontier model in the robot loop only when a small monitor says it is needed.
- Grounded Action Model beats pi-0.5 when the target changes
A robot policy built on a frozen 3D grounding backbone posts 61% average success on LIBERO-PRO, and the authors still call grounding errors an open problem.
- OM-1 unplugs an Ethernet cable, and the video is 1x speed
Reward AI's new foundation model drew praise from Chris Paxton for a task most robots fumble.
- Watney raises $80M for data center robots
The company says it runs the largest fleet of dexterous robots operating around the clock in the United States, and every number in that claim is its own.
- RAI's AthenaZero throws a baseball at 113 km/h
The pitch is a stunt. The number under it is 3.97 kg of effective mass at the wrist.
- X Square's dual-arm robot is sorting parcels for Lululemon
The QUANTA X1 Pro is on a live logistics line in Wuhan, though X Square has not said how many robots or how much they move.
- Astra 35%, Fable 15%, human teleop 100% on Pandroid robots
A controlled real-hardware benchmark put two general models on robot control, and Chris Paxton says robotics labs should be asking why it was not their models.
- Lerrel Pinto takes a swipe at billion-dollar robot demos
He named no company and no demo, and Mahi Shafiullah replied with a quoted line and a link.
- ETH Zurich robot hand walks around on its own fingers
No wheels, no legs, no separate drive mechanism, and the power and compute ride onboard.
- Pi robot runs box assembly at Dandelion Chocolate
Chelsea Finn says the hard part was not the dexterous box folding, it was putting the finished boxes on the pile without knocking it over.
- Astra drove a robot arm from one human video, Xiao says
A first-pass success on one task, a self-written real2sim pipeline, and a benchmark post that says the gap is still ten times.
- GPT-6 Astra hits 95% on a robot arm task, Chooi says
The model wrote end-effector poses directly, with no VLA in the loop, and researchers are already arguing about whether that is the cheap way to do it.
- OopsieData hits 15k robot episodes from 54 labs
The shared pool of real-world manipulation rollouts keeps the messy runs most datasets throw away.
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