# Mana: Dexterous Manipulation of Articulated Tools

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.13677 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13677/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07113/) (2019)
- [Learning Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00177/) (2018)
- [DexMV: Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulation from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05877/) (2021)
- [DexCap: Scalable and Portable Mocap Data Collection System for Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07788/) (2024)
- [DeXtreme: Transfer of Agile In-hand Manipulation from Simulation to Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13702/) (2022)
- [Open-TeleVision: Teleoperation with Immersive Active Visual Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01512/) (2024)
- [DexGraspNet: A Large-Scale Robotic Dexterous Grasp Dataset for General Objects Based on Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02697/) (2022)
- [OakInk: A Large-scale Knowledge Repository for Understanding Hand-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15709/) (2022)
- [DexPilot: Vision Based Teleoperation of Dexterous Robotic Hand-Arm System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03135/) (2019)
- [UniDexGrasp++: Improving Dexterous Grasping Policy Learning via Geometry-aware Curriculum and Iterative Generalist-Specialist Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00464/) (2023)
- [General In-Hand Object Rotation with Vision and Touch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09979/) (2023)
- [EgoScale: Scaling Dexterous Manipulation with Diverse Egocentric Human Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16710/) (2026)
- [DexGraspVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Framework Towards General Dexterous Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20900/) (2025)
- [DexPoint: Generalizable Point Cloud Reinforcement Learning for Sim-to-Real Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09423/) (2022)
- [Rotating without Seeing: Towards In-hand Dexterity through Touch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10880/) (2023)
- [Robotic Telekinesis: Learning a Robotic Hand Imitator by Watching Humans on Youtube](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10448/) (2022)
- [Bunny-VisionPro: Real-Time Bimanual Dexterous Teleoperation for Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03162/) (2024)
- [DexArt: Benchmarking Generalizable Dexterous Manipulation with Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05706/) (2023)
- [ManipTrans: Efficient Dexterous Bimanual Manipulation Transfer via Residual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21860/) (2025)
- [Robot Synesthesia: In-Hand Manipulation with Visuotactile Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01853/) (2023)
- [Global Planning for Contact-Rich Manipulation via Local Smoothing of Quasi-dynamic Contact Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10787/) (2022)
- [Sequential Dexterity: Chaining Dexterous Policies for Long-Horizon Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00987/) (2023)
- [Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Dexterous Manipulation on Humanoids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20396/) (2025)
- [DextrAH-RGB: Visuomotor Policies to Grasp Anything with Dexterous Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01791/) (2024)
- [Twisting Lids Off with Two Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02338/) (2024)
- [DextrAH-G: Pixels-to-Action Dexterous Arm-Hand Grasping with Geometric Fabrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02274/) (2024)
- [Object-Centric Dexterous Manipulation from Human Motion Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04005/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Articulated tool manipulation remains a major challenge in dexterous robotics due to the need to coordinate internal degrees of freedom and contact-rich interactions. While prior work has largely focused on rigid objects, articulated tool use remains underexplored because of its physical complexity and the difficulty of learning functional grasping and manipulation policies. We present Mana (Manipulation Animator), a general sim-to-real framework that reinterprets dexterous manipulation as an animation problem. Inspired by computer animation, Mana employs a coarse-to-fine pipeline that transforms procedurally-generated grasp keyframes into manipulation trajectories through motion planning and reinforcement learning. The data generation process is largely automatic, requiring only a few mouse clicks to specify functional affordances (<1 minute per tool). Across four articulated tools spanning different scales and joint types, Mana achieves zero-shot sim-to-real transfer for both grasping and in-hand manipulation, demonstrating a scalable approach to dexterous articulated tool use.