Towards Robotic Dexterous Hand Intelligence: A Survey
This survey provides a holistic review of dexterous hand research from four complementary aspects: hardware, control/learning methods, datasets/evaluation, and limitations/future directions.
[2605.13925] Towards Robotic Dexterous Hand Intelligence: A Survey
[Submitted on 13 May 2026]
Title:Towards Robotic Dexterous Hand Intelligence: A Survey
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Abstract:Robotic dexterous hands are central to contact-rich manipulation, with rapid progress driven by advances in hardware, sensing, control, simulation, and data generation. However, existing studies are often developed under different assumptions regarding hand embodiments, sensory configurations, task settings, training data, and evaluation protocols, making systematic comparison difficult and obscuring the developmental trajectory of the field. This survey provides a holistic review of dexterous hand research from four complementary aspects. First, we present a hardware-level analysis covering actuation, transmission, perception, and representative hand designs, highlighting the key trade-offs in force capability, compliance, bandwidth, integration, and system complexity. Furthermore, we review control and learning methods for dexterous manipulation from a methodological perspective, grouping representative works by major paradigms and tracing their evolution in chronological order. In addition, we consolidate datasets, modality design, and evaluation practices, which enables methodological progress to be interpreted together with the ways in which it is trained, benchmarked, and assessed. Finally, we discuss the major limitations of current dexterous hand research and summarize the corresponding future directions. By connecting hardware analysis, methodological development, data resources, and evaluation, this survey aims to provide a structured understanding of dexterous hand research and to clarify the most important open challenges for future study.
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.13925 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2605.13925v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.13925
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Weiguang Zhao [view email] [v1] Wed, 13 May 2026 15:23:17 UTC (1,658 KB)
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