Manipulation
Robot grasping and manipulation — end-effector design, bimanual coordination, and dexterity benchmarks across research and industry.
Coverage (12 articles)
- NVIDIA SONIC Scales Humanoid Control Beyond Task-Specific Limits — NVIDIA researchers released SONIC, a single controller trained on over 100 million motion frames that lets humanoids handle diverse whole-body movements from VR
- Tiangong Ultra 8.64s Record and AGIBOT Medals at 2026 Beijing Games — Tiangong Ultra from Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center ran the 100m in 8.64 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. Shanghai-based AGIBOT le
- Skild AI S1 Achieves 10-Minute Tasks from One Video Prompt — Skild AI released its S1 robotics foundation model on August 25, 2026. The model performs unseen long-horizon manipulation tasks up to 10 minutes long after wat
- SimTac & DexSkin: Biomorphic Tactile Arrays and Hybrid MPC for Sim-to-Real — November 2025 arXiv paper SimTac (Zhang et al., King’s College London/BIT) introduces a physics-based MPM simulator for vision-based biomorphic tactile sensors
- Pi0.7 and Helix: VLA Transformers Advance Zero-Shot Dexterous Manipulation — Physical Intelligence's π₀.7 (April 2026) and Figure AI's Helix (February 2025) represent state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, achieving open-w
- ThorArena Benchmark Exposes Force-Aware Gaps in Humanoid Controllers — ThorArena, a new benchmark from TU Munich, tests how humanoid robots handle physical contact by replaying real human forces in simulation. The results expose ma
- NVIDIA Isaac GR00T 1.7 VLA Powers End-to-End Humanoid Policy Training — NVIDIA Isaac GR00T 1.7 VLA and full humanoid development platform launch July 2026, enabling neural feedback loops, zero-shot generalization, and torque mapping
- Apptronik Robot Park Powers Apollo 3 Humanoid Data Factory — Apptronik's 90,000 sq ft Austin Robot Park, opened June 30 2026, deploys Apollo 2 fleets to generate real-world datasets for Gemini Robotics VLA models, acceler
- Proception.AI ProHand 1.0: Ex-Tesla Optimus Team Ships Dexterous Hands After… — Proception.AI raises $11M seed led by First Round Capital and ships ProHand 1.0 tendon-driven robotic hand plus ProGlove data platform after settling Tesla trad
- Skild AI's $1.4B Skild Brain: Omni-Bodied VLA Foundation Model — Skild AI closed a $1.4 billion Series C at over $14 billion valuation, led by SoftBank with NVIDIA's NVentures and Bezos Expeditions participating. The funding
- MIT PolyTouch: Multi-Modal Tactile Arrays Drive 2025 Diffusion Policies — arXiv:2504.19341 details MIT CSAIL's PolyTouch finger integrating camera-based tactile, acoustic, and peripheral vision sensing for robust contact-rich manipula
- OpenVLA 7B Advances Zero-Shot VLA Control Over RT-2 — OpenVLA's 7B-parameter Transformer delivers superior zero-shot generalization on LIBERO benchmarks compared to RT-2-X while enabling high-frequency neural feedb