Manipulation

Manipulation refers to purposeful physical interaction with objects — picking, placing, assembling, folding, inserting, pouring, and similar tasks. Robot manipulation is one of the most active research areas in embodied AI, because even simple everyday tasks (loading a dishwasher, opening a package) require rich perception, precise motor control, and robust grasp planning. Manipulation difficulty scales from simple pick-and-place with known objects in fixed setups, through contact-rich assembly, to fully dexterous in-hand reorientation with novel objects in unstructured scenes. SVRC's data services specialize in collecting manipulation demonstrations for training and evaluation.