Manipulation

Articulated Object Manipulation

Articulated object manipulation is the manipulation of objects with internal joints, such as doors, drawers, laptops, scissors, and appliances, whose parts move relative to each other along revolute or prismatic axes. Success requires estimating the kinematic structure and joint parameters, then generating motions that respect the resulting constraint, since forcing against a hinge axis stalls or damages hardware. Datasets like PartNet-Mobility and benchmarks built on it standardized study of the problem.

Why it matters for physical AI

Homes and workplaces are full of doors, drawers, and lids, so generalizing across unseen articulation types is a prerequisite for useful household and service robots, and a persistent failure mode of purely visual policies.