Robotics & World Models Reading Club 12: Origami Robotics on Dexterity Benchmark — San Francisco

A high-signal reading group for AI researchers & builders pushing the frontiers of robotic world models, WAMs, and embodied intelligence. In our previous sessions, we brought together researchers and engineers from Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Dyna, Physical Intelligence, Tesla, Generalist, Rhoda AI, and leading Bay Area robotics startups.

Hosted by Junfan Zhu & Aurora Feng.

​​Reading Club 12's Core Theme: Dexterity Benchmark We Need

Quanting (Daniel) Xie, Origami Robotics

2026 is shaping up to be the year of dexterity claims. Frontier robotics labs now advertise "human-level" and "dexterity-first" manipulation, and this spring alone three separate benchmark initiatives launched from industry, academia, and the standards community. No two of them measure dexterity the same way, and none can be compared head-to-head. The term itself is still poorly defined. Existing taxonomies cover only a narrow slice of manipulation, companies pick their own evaluation axes, and demo reels stand in for protocols. Meanwhile, the verification and reproducibility machinery that made benchmarks work in vision and NLP, or even in 1940s occupational therapy, has yet to arrive in robot manipulation. In this talk I trace a century of attempts to measure dexterity, from the Purdue Pegboard to this month's benchmark launches, and argue that all the pieces of a proper dexterity benchmark already exist, just scattered across communities that rarely talk to each other. This will be an interactive session: bring your own definition of dexterity, and we'll see whether the room converges any better than the field has.

​​​​Pre-Readings

Definitions & taxonomies

Napier, The Prehensile Movements of the Human Hand, JBJS 1956 Elliott & Connolly, A Classification of Manipulative Hand Movements, Dev. Med. Child Neurol. 1984 Cutkosky, On Grasp Choice, Grasp Models, and the Design of Hands, IEEE T-RA 1989 Ma & Dollar, On Dexterity and Dexterous Manipulation, ICAR 2011 Bullock et al., A Hand-Centric Classification of Human and Robot Dexterous Manipulation, IEEE ToH 2013 Dafle et al., Extrinsic Dexterity: In-Hand Manipulation with External Forces, ICRA 2014 Feix et al., The GRASP Taxonomy of Human Grasp Types, IEEE THMS 2016

Human dexterity assessment

Tiffin & Asher, The Purdue Pegboard, J. Applied Psychology 1948 Mathiowetz et al., Box and Block Test, AJOT 1985 Light et al., SHAP: Southampton Hand Assessment Procedure, Arch. PM&R 2002

Robot-hand dexterity benchmarks

Zhou et al., 50 Hand Dexterity Benchmarks (HD-marks), 2020 Coulson et al., The Elliott and Connolly Benchmark, IEEE-RAS Humanoids 2021 Elangovan et al., Modular Dexterity Test Board, 2022 Liconti, Zhou, et al., POMDAR: A Benchmark of Dexterity for Anthropomorphic Robotic Hands, arXiv:2604.09294, 2026

Task suites & object kits

Calli et al., YCB Object and Model Set, ICAR 2015 Kimble et al., Benchmarking Protocols for Small Parts Robotic Assembly (NIST task boards), IEEE RA-L 2020 Heo et al., FurnitureBench, RSS 2023 Luo et al., FMB: A Functional Manipulation Benchmark, IJRR 2024 Liu et al., LIBERO, NeurIPS 2023; Nasiriany et al., RoboCasa, RSS 2024

Evaluation methodology & infrastructure

Li et al., SimplerEnv: Evaluating Real-World Robot Manipulation Policies in Simulation, CoRL 2024 Zhou et al., AutoEval: Autonomous Evaluation of Generalist Robot Policies in the Real World, arXiv:2503.24278, 2025 Atreya, Pertsch, et al., RoboArena: Distributed Real-World Evaluation of Generalist Robot Policies, CoRL 2025 Agia et al., CUPID: Curating Data your Robot Loves with Influence Functions, CoRL 2025 Chen, Kimble, et al., ManipulationNet, arXiv:2603.04363, 2026

​​Location

San Francisco (Downtown)

​​​​​Date & Time

Saturday, June 13, 2026 | 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM

​​​​​​Join Discord Community

https://discord.gg/WH7DrTHRXK

​​​​​Follow Saturday Robotics on X

https://x.com/saturdayrobotic

​​​​​Agenda

2:00 PM – 2:30 PM Door Opens & Social

  • Food 😋, beverages🧋 and UNLIMITED strawberries 🍓 (our official reading club fruits ☺️😄).

2:30 PM – 4:00 PM Keynote by Quanting (Daniel) Xie, Origami Robotics

Online access via Zoom: TBD

YouTube Recording: TBD (We are looking for recording volunteers)

4:00 PM – 5:00 PM Q&A, ​open-floor roundtable (10–20 min per topic) on spotlight papers or any paper you’d like to highlight. Feel free to share why the paper matters and its technical details.

​​​​Future events

#reading-club-15-0627:

#deep-tech-week-14-0625:

#reading-club-13-0620: HumanEgo: Train Robot Policy from 30 min Egocentric Videos — SF 0620

#reading-club-12-0613: Origami Robotics (YC W26) on Dexterity

​​​Past events

#cvpr-denver-11-0606: 🤖🥘 Saturday Robotics x Manycore Tech x Neural Motion | CVPR 2026 Denver Research Night | Robotics & World Models Reading Club 11

Junfan Zhu & Aurora Feng, Founders of Saturday Robotics

Anthony Zhao, Head of North America at Manycore Tech SpacialVerse

Aurora Feng, Founder at Neural Motion. NM-GenET.

Max Zhaoshuo Li, Robotics and World Model Tech Lead at NVIDIA Cosmos. Cosmos 3.

Xiaofan Li, World Model Tech Lead at X Square Robot. WALL-WM.

Zesen Zhao, University of Michigan. Test-Time Scaling for World Action Models via Zero-Shot Geometric Verification.

Pengyi Liao. VGGT-Ω: From 3D Reconstruction to Scalable Spatial Representation.

Jie Wang, University of Pennsylvania, GRASP Lab. Toward a Robotics MMLU: Lessons from Sim & Real Evaluations of Generalist Policies.

Gordon Qian, Senior AI Researcher at Snap. Diffusion-DRF: Free, Rich, and Differentiable Reward for Video Diffusion Fine-Tuning.

#reading-club-10-0530: Bringing Robots to Life — Learning Humanoid Instincts from the Body Up | San Francisco 0530

Haochen Shi (Stanford, co-advised by Karen Liu & Shuran Song)

#private-dinner-01-0529: Robo Plov x Saturday Robotics

#reading-club-09-0523: CVPR Warm-up & Founders Spotlight — DeltaWorld + VisuoTactile Dexterous Hands

Tommie Kerssies (Amazon Frontier AI & Robotics)

Arjun Subramaniam (Factory Intelligence)

#reading-club-08-0516: Embodied Human Data as the “Internet of Motion and Behavior”

Ryan Punamiya (NVIDIA Gear, Georgia Tech)

#reading-club-07-0509: Learning to Dream: World Models, Imagination, Path to Foundation Models for Control

Ahmet Şemi ASARKAYA (Agility Robotics)

#reading-club-06-0502: Evolution of Video World Models for Robotics

Tongzhou Mu (Rhoda AI)

#reading-club-05-0425: World Models for Physical Intelligence: From Predictive Brains to Embodied Robots

Daniel Dugas & Sergio Arnaud (Meta FAIR)

#reading-club-04-0418: Abstractions of the Physical World for Decision-Making

Siming He (UC Berkeley)

#reading-club-03-0411: Robotic Policy Adaptation

Haoyi Niu (UC Berkeley)

#reading-club-02-0404: JEPA Zoo

Julian Saks (https://x.com/JulianSaks)

#reading-club-01-0328

​​​​​Logistics

Spots are limited. Please arrive by 2:00 PM for check-in. Keynote will begin promptly at 2:30 PM.

  • We currently do not have volunteers available to assist with late check-ins. Given the high volume of inquiries and 100+ attendees (both online and onsite), we kindly ask that you arrive on time to ensure smooth entry.
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