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arXiv · 2505.24853

DexMachina: Functional Retargeting for Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation

Zhao Mandi·Yifan Hou·Dieter Fox·Yashraj Narang·Ajay Mandlekar·Shuran Song
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Abstract

We study the problem of functional retargeting: learning dexterous manipulation policies to track object states from human hand-object demonstrations. We focus on long-horizon, bimanual tasks with articulated objects, which is challenging due to large action space, spatiotemporal discontinuities, and embodiment gap between human and robot hands. We propose DexMachina, a novel curriculum-based algorithm: the key idea is to use virtual object controllers with decaying strength: an object is first driven automatically towards its target states, such that the policy can gradually learn to take over under motion and contact guidance. We release a simulation benchmark with a diverse set of tasks and dexterous hands, and show that DexMachina significantly outperforms baseline methods. Our algorithm and benchmark enable a functional comparison for hardware designs, and we present key findings informed by quantitative and qualitative results. With the recent surge in dexterous hand development, we hope this work will provide a useful platform for identifying desirable hardware capabilities and lower the barrier for contributing to future research. Videos and more at https://project-dexmachina.github.io/

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Zhao Mandi, Yifan Hou, Dieter Fox, Yashraj Narang, Ajay Mandlekar, Shuran Song. 2025-05-30. DexMachina: Functional Retargeting for Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24853

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