Towards Robotic Dexterous Hand Intelligence: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews the hardware, control methods, data practices, and evaluation protocols in robotic dexterous hand research, highlighting challenges and future directions.

Contribution

It offers a holistic, structured overview connecting hardware, methodology, data, and evaluation to clarify the field's development and open challenges.

Findings

Analyzes key trade-offs in dexterous hand hardware design.

Reviews evolution of control and learning methods.

Summarizes datasets and evaluation practices.

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.