OpenJaws: An Open Hardware UMI Framework with Stereo Localization for Generalist Manipulation

Adithyavairavan Murali; Yash Oza; Karanbir Chahal; Neel Jawale; Silas De Vries; Hesam Rabeti; Erwin Coumans; Balakumar Sundaralingam; Stan Birchfield

arXiv · 2610.36598

OpenJaws: An Open Hardware UMI Framework with Stereo Localization for Generalist Manipulation

Adithyavairavan Murali·Yash Oza·Karanbir Chahal·Neel Jawale·Silas De Vries·Hesam Rabeti·Erwin Coumans·Balakumar Sundaralingam·Stan Birchfield

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Handheld data-collection interfaces such as the Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) allow manipulation demonstrations to be gathered in the wild without a robot in the loop, but the quality of the resulting action labels is bounded by the accuracy of vision-based localization. Existing systems recover end-effector pose from monocular visual-inertial odometry, which is subject to scale ambiguity and drift, or delegate tracking to closed-source modules and external infrastructure that reintroduce cost and setup burden. We present OpenJaws, a fully open hardware and software framework for sensorized UMI that improves localization and simplifies deployment across robot platforms. OpenJaws pairs a modular, 3D-printed gripper exposing a standardized ISO adapter with a low-cost stereo camera to recover metric camera trajectories. We further introduce UMI-Loc-Bench-v1, a benchmark quantifying real-world localization accuracy for handheld data-collection devices, and show that stereo localization substantially outperforms monocular alternatives. Finally, we demonstrate that policies trained on data collected with OpenJaws can be deployed on a real robot across multiple tasks. Hardware, software, and data are released under a commercially permissive license. Code, data, and videos are available at https://open-jaws.github.io/

Explore related subjects

cs.RO

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Adithyavairavan Murali, Yash Oza, Karanbir Chahal, Neel Jawale, Silas De Vries, Hesam Rabeti, Erwin Coumans, Balakumar Sundaralingam, Stan Birchfield. 2026-10-27. OpenJaws: An Open Hardware UMI Framework with Stereo Localization for Generalist Manipulation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36598

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Learning to Feel the Future: DreamTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable generalization by mapping web-scale knowledge to robotic control, yet they remain blind to physical contact. Consequently, they struggle with contact-rich manipulation tasks that require reasoning about force, texture, and slip. While some approaches incorporate low-dimensional tactile signals, they fail to capture the high-resolution dynamics essential for such interactions. To address this limitation, we introduce DreamTacVLA, a framework that grounds VLA models in contact physics by learning to feel the future. Our model adopts a hierarchical perception scheme in which high-resolution tactile images serve as micro-vision inputs coupled with wrist-camera local vision and third-person macro vision. To reconcile these multi-scale sensory streams, we first train a unified policy with a Hierarchical Spatial Alignment (HSA) loss that aligns tactile tokens with their spatial counterparts in the wrist and third-person views. To further deepen the model's understanding of fine-grained contact dynamics, we finetune the system with a tactile world model that predicts future tactile signals. To mitigate tactile data scarcity and the wear-prone nature of tactile sensors, we construct a hybrid large-scale dataset sourced from both high-fidelity digital twin and real-world experiments. By anticipating upcoming tactile states, DreamTacVLA acquires a rich model of contact physics and conditions its actions on both real observations and imagined consequences. Across contact-rich manipulation tasks, it outperforms state-of-the-art VLA baselines, achieving up to 95% success, highlighting the importance of understanding physical contact for robust, touch-aware robotic agents.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Grasp-Then-Plan with Failure Attribution: A Closed Two-Stage Framework for Precise and Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

In robotic manipulation, the tight coupling between grasping and motion planning often obscures the true source of failure, leading to inefficient trial-and-error. To enable efficient long-horizon manipulation, we propose GTP-FA (Grasp-Then-Plan with Failure Attribution), a task-oriented two-stage 'grasp-then-plan' framework that generates grasp candidates and performs downstream motion planning conditioned on the selected grasp. Given a failed manipulation trajectory, we learn a failure attribution model that generalizes to unseen grasps and produces a stable distribution over failure modes for diagnosis-guided optimization. Based on these attribution results, we then optimize both modules in a diagnosis-driven manner: on the grasping side, we inject task-level priors and risk penalties into grasp candidate scoring and optimization to suppress unstable or task-incompatible grasps; on the planning side, we target high-risk initial states through data collection and fine-tuning to address genuine planning bottlenecks. We evaluate the proposed framework in both simulation and real-robot experiments, and show that GTP-FA improves the corresponding base learners across RL, IL, diffusion-policy, and VLA-based settings, achieving substantially higher overall task success rates.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

FAWAM: Force-Aware World Action Models for Closed-Loop Contact-Rich Manipulation

Force signals provide critical interaction cues for contact-rich robotic manipulation. However, existing methods mostly use force as an additional observation modality, without fully exploiting its role in modeling future interaction dynamics or guiding execution-time feedback correction. In this paper, we propose FAWAM, a force-aware world action model that incorporates force information at three levels: perception, prediction, and closed-loop execution. FAWAM first encodes historical 6-axis force/torque signals to modulate action generation, then jointly predicts future actions and end-effector wrenches to explicitly model contact evolution. It further introduces a residual correction module that uses the predicted wrench trajectory as an execution-time reference to refine actions online based on real-time force feedback. Real-world experiments across multiple contact-rich tasks show that FAWAM improves the average success rate by 36.25% over vision-only baselines and 21.25% over existing force-aware baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of our force-aware framework for robust contact-rich manipulation.

cs.RO↗