UniDex: A Robot Foundation Suite for Universal Dexterous Hand Control from Egocentric Human Videos
2026-03-23 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created UniDex, a system to help robots with different hands learn how to handle objects carefully and skillfully. They built a big dataset from videos of human hands and turned the movements into commands robots can use. They also designed a special way to unify different robot hand controls, making it easier to transfer skills between hands. Additionally, the authors made an easy setup to capture human hand data to train the robots without needing expensive robot data collection. Their system worked well on difficult tasks and showed it can generalize to new situations and different robot hands.
dexterous manipulationrobot teleoperationvision-language-action policytrajectory retargeting3D pointcloudsaction parameterizationcross-hand transferRGB-D capturetask generalizationrobot learning datasets
Authors
Gu Zhang, Qicheng Xu, Haozhe Zhang, Jianhan Ma, Long He, Yiming Bao, Zeyu Ping, Zhecheng Yuan, Chenhao Lu, Chengbo Yuan, Tianhai Liang, Xiaoyu Tian, Maanping Shao, Feihong Zhang, Mingyu Ding, Yang Gao, Hao Zhao, Hang Zhao, Huazhe Xu
Abstract
Dexterous manipulation remains challenging due to the cost of collecting real-robot teleoperation data, the heterogeneity of hand embodiments, and the high dimensionality of control. We present UniDex, a robot foundation suite that couples a large-scale robot-centric dataset with a unified vision-language-action (VLA) policy and a practical human-data capture setup for universal dexterous hand control. First, we construct UniDex-Dataset, a robot-centric dataset over 50K trajectories across eight dexterous hands (6--24 DoFs), derived from egocentric human video datasets. To transform human data into robot-executable trajectories, we employ a human-in-the-loop retargeting procedure to align fingertip trajectories while preserving plausible hand-object contacts, and we operate on explicit 3D pointclouds with human hands masked to narrow kinematic and visual gaps. Second, we introduce the Function-Actuator-Aligned Space (FAAS), a unified action space that maps functionally similar actuators to shared coordinates, enabling cross-hand transfer. Leveraging FAAS as the action parameterization, we train UniDex-VLA, a 3D VLA policy pretrained on UniDex-Dataset and finetuned with task demonstrations. In addition, we build UniDex-Cap, a simple portable capture setup that records synchronized RGB-D streams and human hand poses and converts them into robot-executable trajectories to enable human-robot data co-training that reduces reliance on costly robot demonstrations. On challenging tool-use tasks across two different hands, UniDex-VLA achieves 81% average task progress and outperforms prior VLA baselines by a large margin, while exhibiting strong spatial, object, and zero-shot cross-hand generalization. Together, UniDex-Dataset, UniDex-VLA, and UniDex-Cap provide a scalable foundation suite for universal dexterous manipulation.