Concurrent Prehensile and Nonprehensile Manipulation:
A Practical Approach to Multi-Stage Dexterous Tasks

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2026

University of Southern California

66% Avg. success / training objects
2–3× Over diffusion-policy baselines
1,000+ Real-world trials
3–4 Demonstrations per object
2 Dexterous embodiments

1-Minute Overview Video

Captioned summary of the method, tasks, and real-world results.

Method Overview

DexMulti decomposes multi-stage manipulation into a retrieve-align-execute pipeline. Given a new scene, the system retrieves the most similar demonstrated skill based on object geometry, aligns the skill trajectory to the current object pose using an uncertainty-aware estimator, and executes the aligned action sequence.

DexMulti method overview: retrieve-align-execute pipeline

Task Suite

Three multi-stage dexterous tasks where the robot must keep one object secure while completing a second interaction.

Grasp + Pull

Maintain a grasp, pull open the drawer, and place the held object inside.

Grasp + Open

Hold an object, open the target container, and complete the place-in-container step.

Grasp + Grasp

Sequentially acquire two objects without releasing the first grasp.

Quantitative Results

Success rates (%) on training objects (overall) and held-out test objects. Click any cell to view all trial rollouts for that task/method combination.

Training Objects (Overall)

Method Grasp + Pull Grasp + Open Grasp + Grasp
DexMulti (Ours) 64.7 22/34 67.6 23/34 44.4 12/27
Object-Centric DP3 20.6 7/34 35.3 12/34 29.6 8/27

Test Objects (Generalization)

Method Grasp + Pull Grasp + Open Grasp + Grasp
DexMulti (Ours) 77.4 24/31 71.0 22/31 20.0 3/15
Object-Centric DP3 25.8 8/31 38.7 12/31 46.7 7/15

Comparison with Demonstration-Free Methods

Demonstration-free approaches such as reinforcement learning or grasp synthesis rely on carefully engineered reward functions and initializations, which becomes increasingly difficult for multi-stage tasks.

Failure: Stable Grasp, Poor Task Compatibility

The method finds a stable grasp on the bottle, but the grasp is not compatible with the follow-up manipulation.

Success: Task-Compatible Initialization

A different initialization yields a task-compatible grasp. This contrast highlights how strongly demonstration-free optimization depends on initialization.

Robustness to Perturbations

DexMulti remains stable under external disturbances while continuing multi-stage tasks.

Embodiment Transfer

The same approach transfers across mechanically different dexterous hands without retraining.

LEAP Hand vs Allegro Hand

Side-by-side embodiment transfer on Grasp + Pull across two dexterous hands.

Citation

If you find this work useful, please consider citing it.

@inproceedings{jiang2026concurrent,
  title     = {Concurrent Prehensile and Nonprehensile Manipulation:
               A Practical Approach to Multi-Stage Dexterous Tasks},
  author    = {Jiang, Hao and Wu, Yue and Wang, Yue and
               Sukhatme, Gaurav S. and Seita, Daniel},
  booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots
               and Systems (IROS)},
  year      = {2026}
}