ExplorerRoboticsRobotics
Research PaperResearchia:202606.15095

ORCA: A Platform for Open-Source Dexterity Research

Francesco Capuano

Abstract

Robotics manipulation research increasingly focuses on two-finger parallel grippers for their effectiveness, affordability, and ease of teleoperation. Grippers are nonetheless limited by their form factor, often requiring bimanual setups even for simple reorientation tasks. Anthropomorphic hands are a more natural platform for dexterous robot learning -- closer to the human hand, and capable of learning from human video -- yet they remain hard to use in learning research: even where open and acc...

Submitted: June 15, 2026Subjects: Robotics; Robotics

Description / Details

Robotics manipulation research increasingly focuses on two-finger parallel grippers for their effectiveness, affordability, and ease of teleoperation. Grippers are nonetheless limited by their form factor, often requiring bimanual setups even for simple reorientation tasks. Anthropomorphic hands are a more natural platform for dexterous robot learning -- closer to the human hand, and capable of learning from human video -- yet they remain hard to use in learning research: even where open and accessible hand hardware exists, the software for control, simulation, teleoperation, and retargeting is scattered in one-off code bases, and largely disconnected from the robot-learning ecosystem. In this work, we introduce the \orcalearning stack, an open-source research stack for dexterity as a first-class robot learning domain. Our \orcastack unifies low-level control, simulation, teleoperation from a range of consumer platforms, and hand retargeting, behind a single interface, and integrates natively with popular robot-learning frameworks such as \lerobot, so dexterous hand researchers can leverage the same data, training, and evaluation pipelines used for non-dexterous robot learning. We demonstrate a complete end-to-end workflow, collecting expert demonstrations of an in-hand reorientation task by teleoperation with a consumer-grade VR headset, training an autonomous policy with \lerobot, and evaluating the learned policy in a fully reproducible and observable setup. We open-source the entire stack as a shared, reproducible foundation for dexterous-manipulation research.


Source: arXiv:2606.14561v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14561v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.14561v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14561v1

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Date:
Jun 15, 2026
Topic:
Robotics
Area:
Robotics
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