Submitted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Practice, 2025

Chendong Xin*, Mingrui Yu*, Yongpeng Jiang, Zhefeng Zhang, and Xiang Li

Tsinghua University

(*Equal Contribution)

arXiv (coming soon) | Appendix | Code | Dataset | CAD

Video

Abstract

Kinematic retargeting from human hands to robot hands is essential for transferring dexterity from humans to robots in manipulation teleoperation and imitation learning. However, due to mechanical differences between human and robot hands, completely reproducing human motions on robot hands is impossible. Existing works on retargeting incorporate various optimization objectives, focusing on different aspects of hand configuration. However, the lack of experimental comparative studies leaves the significance and effectiveness of these objectives unclear. This work aims to analyze these retargeting objectives for dexterous manipulation through extensive real-world comparative experiments. Specifically, we propose a comprehensive retargeting objective formulation that integrates intuitively crucial factors appearing in recent approaches. The significance of each factor is evaluated through experimental ablation studies on the full objective in kinematic posture retargeting and real-world teleoperated manipulation tasks. Experimental results and conclusions provide valuable insights for designing more accurate and effective retargeting algorithms for real-world dexterous manipulation.

Contact

If you have any question, feel free to contact the authors: Mingrui Yu, mingruiyu98@gmail.com .

Mingrui Yu’s Homepage is at mingrui-yu.github.io.