Mana: New Framework Enables Robots to Manipulate Complex Articulated Tools
Researchers have introduced Mana (Manipulation Animator), a sim-to-real robotics framework that allows dexterous robotic hands to grasp and manipulate articulated tools such as scissors or pliers. The system reframes manipulation as an animation problem, using a coarse-to-fine pipeline combining procedurally generated keyframes, motion planning, and reinforcement learning. It achieves zero-shot transfer from simulation to real-world use across four different tool types, with tool setup requiring less than one minute of human input.
A team of robotics researchers has presented Mana, a general-purpose framework designed to tackle one of dexterous robotics' persistent challenges: manipulating tools that have internal moving parts, known as articulated tools. Unlike rigid objects, articulated tools such as scissors, wrenches, or clamps require a robot to coordinate both grasping and the tool's own degrees of freedom simultaneously. Mana addresses this by treating manipulation as an animation problem, drawing inspiration from computer graphics pipelines to convert procedurally generated grasp keyframes into full manipulation trajectories via motion planning and reinforcement learning. A key practical advantage is the minimal human effort required: specifying a tool's functional affordances takes fewer than one minute using simple mouse clicks. The framework was tested across four articulated tools with varying scales and joint types, achieving zero-shot sim-to-real transfer — meaning policies trained entirely in simulation worked on physical hardware without additional fine-tuning. The authors argue this demonstrates a scalable path toward general dexterous tool use in robotics. The preprint was submitted to arXiv on June 11, 2026, and has not yet undergone formal peer review.
What's missing
As a preprint, Mana has not been peer reviewed. Key open questions include: how the framework performs on a broader and more diverse set of articulated tools beyond the four tested.
What different sources said
- arXiv cs.AICenter
Mana: Dexterous Manipulation of Articulated Tools
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