Manipulation

Open-Vocabulary Manipulation

Open-vocabulary manipulation is the ability of a robot to manipulate objects specified by arbitrary natural language, including categories never seen in its training demonstrations, rather than a fixed set of known classes. Systems achieve this by grounding language in vision-language model features, as in CLIP-based pipelines, open-vocabulary detectors, and semantic 3D scene representations, then connecting that grounding to grasping and motion generation.

Why it matters for physical AI

Homes and workplaces contain unbounded object variety, so scaling beyond closed category lists is a prerequisite for general-purpose robots, and VLM grounding is currently the main lever.