Bimanual Dexterous Tool Use — CoRL 2026 Workshop

About the Workshop

Dexterous manipulation has made rapid progress in grasping and pick-and-place, but robots still struggle to use tools with the flexibility and physical competence of humans. Humans not only use general tools across kitchens and household work, but also wield specialized tools for surgery, sports, music, laboratories, repair, and manufacturing. These behaviors are not simply longer versions of pick-and-place: the tool becomes a physical mediator between the body and the world. Successful tool use requires sustained contact, force regulation, evolving hand–tool–object relationships, and often bimanual coordination — where one hand stabilizes, repositions, or constrains the object while the other applies the tool.

Recent progress in dexterous manipulation, imitation and reinforcement learning, tactile sensing, teleoperation, humanoid control, VLA, and world models suggests the field is ready to treat tool use as a central robot learning problem. Yet tool use exposes a fundamental conflict: practical systems require fast, physically grounded, contact-rich execution, while general-purpose systems require high-level reasoning over affordances, future states, and generalization across tools, objects, tasks, and embodiments. Existing systems rarely satisfy both requirements at once.

"How can robot learning bridge physically reliable, contact-rich tool execution with high-level generalizable reasoning?"

Core Challenges & Research Questions

1. Hand–Tool–Object Representations

Tool use requires representing the evolving relationship between hands, fingers, tools, target objects, contacts, and forces. Many useful tasks further require one hand to stabilize, guide, regrasp, or constrain while the other manipulates the tool. What representations make this structure learnable and transferable, and how should robots learn role assignment, hand switching, synchronization, and recovery in long-horizon bimanual tool use?

2. Low-level contact-rich tool-use execution and control

How can robots execute tool-use skills at real-time speed while maintaining stable contact under uncertainty in force, friction, compliance, deformation, and object motion? Which parts of tool use can be learned directly from data, and which parts still require explicit planning, feedback control, tactile/force sensing, or physics-based constraints to achieve stable real-world execution?

3. Multisensory Perception and Feedback for Tool Use

Vision alone is often insufficient for tool use because contacts may be occluded, force thresholds may be subtle, and failure can depend on slip, pressure or deformation. What sensing and hardware capabilities are needed for robust tool-mediated interaction (e.g., vision, touch, force, proprioception, audio, tactile-enabled hands, and teleoperation interfaces)? How should these signals be fused and exposed to policies, controllers, and VLA/world-model systems at the latency and reliability required for real-time tool use?

4. Data, Embodiment Transfer, and Evaluation.

How can robots learn tool use from human videos, motion capture, teleoperation, tactile demonstrations, simulation, and robot self-practice despite differences in morphology, sensing, compliance, and control frequency? What benchmarks and metrics should evaluate not only task success, but also contact stability, force regulation, robustness, generalization, and real-world transfer?

5. High-level Generalizable Tool-Use Reasoning.

How can world models, video prediction, VLA policies, and language-conditioned planners infer tool affordances, predict future physical effects, and generalize across unseen tools, objects, and tasks? Where do these high-level models fail when success depends on precise contact rather than semantic understanding alone? How can their predictions or planning be fast, physically-grounded, and actionable enough under real-time contact uncertainty?

Invited Speakers

Ankur Handa

NVIDIA Robotics

Principal Research Scientist

Karen Liu

Stanford

Professor

Yunfang Yang

Sharpa

Head of US

Jitendra Malik

UC Berkeley

Professor

Program

A challenge-driven, half-day format organized around active discussion: invited challenge talks, contributed spotlights, posters & demos, structured problem-solving, and a fishbowl-style synthesis panel.

Time	Event
2:00 PM	Welcome & Framing: bridging contact-rich execution and generalizable reasoning
2:15 PM	Invited Challenge Talk 1
2:45 PM	Invited Challenge Talk 2
3:15 PM	Contributed Spotlights
3:30 PM	Poster & Demo Session & Coffee Break
4:00 PM	Invited Challenge Talk 3
4:30 PM	Invited Challenge Talk 4
5:00 PM	Structured Problem-Solving / Breakout Discussion
5:30 PM	Fishbowl Synthesis Panel
6:00 PM	Workshop Ends

Call for Papers & Demos

We invite non-archival submissions on tool-mediated physical interaction, including bimanual and single-hand tool use across general, surgical, sports, musical, and household settings; tactile and contact-rich policies; human-to-robot transfer; robot world models; VLA policies; simulation; hardware; and evaluation — as long as the work addresses tool-mediated physical interaction.

Submissions are accepted in four formats: full workshop papers (up to 8 pages), short papers or extended abstracts (up to 4 pages), position or challenge abstracts (1–2 pages), and demo proposals (1–2 pages, accompanied by a short demonstration video). Full papers, short papers, and position abstracts will undergo double-blind peer review. Demo proposals do not need to be anonymized and will be reviewed by the organizers based on relevance, technical interest, feasibility, safety, and potential for audience engagement. We encourage to use CoRL submission template for all submissions. Accepted contributions will be presented as posters, with a subset selected for oral spotlights and demos. For demo proposals, please send the demo video directly to bidextool2026corl@googlegroups.com.

We particularly encourage live demonstrations of dexterous tool-use systems, hardware platforms, teleoperation interfaces, sensing systems, learned policies, and other interactive robotic systems. Demo submissions should include a 1–2 page proposal and a short video showing the proposed demonstration. At least one author of each accepted demo must attend the workshop in person and present the system live.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: 10/9/2026
Notification: 10/18/2026
Camera-ready: 10/25/2026
Workshop: CoRL 2026, Austin, United States

Submit on OpenReview

Call for Panel Questions

We invite the community to help shape the discussion at the BiDexTool 2026 panel by submitting questions, challenges, and provocative topics related to bimanual dexterous tool use and generalist robot intelligence. Questions may address any aspect of tool-mediated physical interaction, including — but not limited to — contact-rich manipulation, bimanual coordination, robot learning, world models, vision-language-action policies, simulation and sim-to-real transfer, teleoperation and data collection, tactile sensing, hardware design, evaluation, and human-to-robot skill transfer. We particularly welcome questions that highlight open problems, competing viewpoints, practical bottlenecks, or assumptions that the community should reconsider. Questions do not need to be associated with a workshop submission, and anyone in the community is welcome to contribute. Questions may be submitted anonymously. Selected questions will be discussed by our panelists during the workshop, and may also be used to organize broader themes for the panel discussion. Panel question submission deadline: November 10, 2026

Submit a panel question