Manipulation
Manipulation
Manipulation is the purposeful control of objects in the environment through selective contact, encompassing grasping, pick-and-place, insertion, tool use, and deformable object handling. It requires coordinating perception, motion planning, and contact-rich control under uncertainty about object geometry, pose, and physical properties. Despite decades of progress, general-purpose manipulation in unstructured environments remains one of the defining open problems of robotics.
Why it matters for physical AI
Most economically valuable physical work is manipulation, and its combinatorial diversity of objects and contacts is precisely the regime where learned, data-driven policies are displacing hand-engineered pipelines.
Build physical AI
Put these concepts to work on real hardware
Axol is a dual-arm robot built for physical AI — teleoperate it, collect demonstrations, and deploy learned policies out of the box.