Dexterous manipulation

Dexterous manipulation is robotic manipulation requiring fine motor control beyond pick-and-place — in-hand object reorientation, multi-finger force regulation, or tool use. Distinct from "manipulation" in the broader sense, which can be satisfied by a parallel-jaw gripper. The canonical benchmarks are in-hand cube reorientation, threading, and dual-arm assembly.

The state of the art in 2026 is still well below human dexterity in unconstrained settings. Shadow Robot Hand, Allegro Hand, and PSYONIC's Ability Hand are long-running hardware reference points. Figure's hand design and 1X's NEO hand are the highest-DOF designs in the current humanoid wave. Most humanoid demos showing manipulation are scripted tasks in known environments; dexterous manipulation in arbitrary settings remains an open problem — and a meaningful axis for evaluating any humanoid program's actual capability.