Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wei, Zhenyu, Yao, Yunchao, Ding, Mingyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16712
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917501834625024
author Wei, Zhenyu
Yao, Yunchao
Ding, Mingyu
author_facet Wei, Zhenyu
Yao, Yunchao
Ding, Mingyu
contents Dexterous manipulation policies today largely assume fixed hand designs, severely restricting their generalization to new embodiments with varied kinematic and structural layouts. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a parameterized canonical representation that unifies a broad spectrum of dexterous hand architectures. It comprises a unified parameter space and a canonical URDF format, offering three key advantages. 1) The parameter space captures essential morphological and kinematic variations for effective conditioning in learning algorithms. 2) A structured latent manifold can be learned over our space, where interpolations between embodiments yield smooth and physically meaningful morphology transitions. 3) The canonical URDF standardizes the action space while preserving dynamic and functional properties of the original URDFs, enabling efficient and reliable cross-embodiment policy learning. We validate these advantages through extensive analysis and experiments, including grasp policy replay, VAE latent encoding, and cross-embodiment zero-shot transfer. Specifically, we train a VAE on the unified representation to obtain a compact, semantically rich latent embedding, and develop a grasping policy conditioned on the canonical representation that generalizes across dexterous hands. We demonstrate, through simulation and real-world tasks on unseen morphologies (e.g., 81.9% zero-shot success rate on 3-finger LEAP Hand), that our framework unifies both the representational and action spaces of structurally diverse hands, providing a scalable foundation for cross-hand learning toward universal dexterous manipulation. Project Page: https://zhenyuwei2003.github.io/OHRA/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_16712
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle One Hand to Rule Them All: Canonical Representations for Unified Dexterous Manipulation
Wei, Zhenyu
Yao, Yunchao
Ding, Mingyu
Robotics
Dexterous manipulation policies today largely assume fixed hand designs, severely restricting their generalization to new embodiments with varied kinematic and structural layouts. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a parameterized canonical representation that unifies a broad spectrum of dexterous hand architectures. It comprises a unified parameter space and a canonical URDF format, offering three key advantages. 1) The parameter space captures essential morphological and kinematic variations for effective conditioning in learning algorithms. 2) A structured latent manifold can be learned over our space, where interpolations between embodiments yield smooth and physically meaningful morphology transitions. 3) The canonical URDF standardizes the action space while preserving dynamic and functional properties of the original URDFs, enabling efficient and reliable cross-embodiment policy learning. We validate these advantages through extensive analysis and experiments, including grasp policy replay, VAE latent encoding, and cross-embodiment zero-shot transfer. Specifically, we train a VAE on the unified representation to obtain a compact, semantically rich latent embedding, and develop a grasping policy conditioned on the canonical representation that generalizes across dexterous hands. We demonstrate, through simulation and real-world tasks on unseen morphologies (e.g., 81.9% zero-shot success rate on 3-finger LEAP Hand), that our framework unifies both the representational and action spaces of structurally diverse hands, providing a scalable foundation for cross-hand learning toward universal dexterous manipulation. Project Page: https://zhenyuwei2003.github.io/OHRA/
title One Hand to Rule Them All: Canonical Representations for Unified Dexterous Manipulation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16712