By reframing tool manipulation as animation and automating data generation, Mana enables robots to learn complex articulated tool use with minimal human effort and achieve real-world performance without task-specific retraining.
Mana is a framework that treats dexterous robot manipulation of articulated tools (like scissors or pliers) as an animation problem. It uses a coarse-to-fine pipeline combining procedural grasp generation, motion planning, and reinforcement learning to learn how to grasp and manipulate tools.