Ankur Handa

I am currently a Principal Research Scientist at NVIDIA Robotics and co-lead the Dexterity robotics research team. Prior to that, I was a Research Scientist at OpenAI and before that I obtained my PhD from Imperial College London.

Bio

I began my career in hardware and robotics, completed a PhD in computer vision, and then returned to robotics with a stronger foundation in machine learning and vision techniques. My work now heavily relies on simulation and after exploring the role that rendering engines can play in generating data for understanding and building SLAM systems, I have been combining physics simulation with rendering to develop robust multi-fingered dexterous manipulation systems. This approach has powered my recent Dex series of work over the past several years.

Selected Publications

  • 1.
    Isaac Lab: A GPU-accelerated simulation framework for multi-modal robot learning
    project website / arxiv (2025)
  • 2.
    End-to-End RL Improves Dexterous Grasping Policies
    project website / arxiv (2025)
  • 3.
    CoT-VLA: Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Models
    project website / arxiv CVPR 2025
  • 4.
    DextrAH-RGB: Visuomotor Policies to Grasp Anything with Dexterous Hands
    project website / arxiv (2024)
  • 5.
    DextrAH-G: Pixels-to-Action Dexterous Arm-Hand Grasping with Geometric Fabrics
    project website / arxiv CoRL 2024
  • 6.
    DeXtreme: Transfer of Agile In-Hand Manipulation from Simulation to Reality
    project website / arxiv ICRA 2023
  • 7.
    CuRobo: Parallelized Collision-Free Robot Motion Generation
    project website / arxiv ICRA 2023
  • 8.
    DexPBT: Scaling up Dexterous Manipulation for Hand-Arm Systems with Population-Based Training
    project website / arxiv RSS 2023
  • 9.
    Transferring Dexterous Manipulation from GPU Simulation to a Remote Real-World TriFinger
    project website / arxiv IROS 2022
  • 10.
    Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation
    project website / arxiv NeurIPS 2021
  • 11.
    DexPilot: Vision-Based Teleoperation of Dexterous Robotic Hand-Arm System
    project website / arxiv ICRA 2020
  • 12.
    Robust Learning of Tactile Force Estimation through Robot Interaction
    project website / arxiv ICRA 2019 • Best Manipulation Paper Award Finalist
  • 13.
    Closing the Sim-to-Real Loop: Adapting Simulation Randomization with Real World Experience
    project website / arxiv ICRA 2019 • Best Student Paper Award Finalist
  • 14.
    GPU-Accelerated Robotic Simulation for Distributed Reinforcement Learning
    project website / arxiv CoRL 2018 • Spotlight
  • 15.
    SceneNet RGB-D Segmentation: Can 5M Synthetic Images Beat Generic ImageNet Pre-training on Indoor Segmentation?
    project website / arxiv ICCV 2017
  • 16.
    Understanding Real World Indoor Scenes With Synthetic Data
    project website / arxiv CVPR 2016
  • 17.
    A Benchmark for RGB-D Visual Odometry, 3D Reconstruction and SLAM
    project website ICRA 2014
  • 18.
    Simultaneous Mosaicing and Tracking with an Event Camera
    project website BMVC 2014 • Best Industry Paper Award Winner
  • 19.
    Real-Time Camera Tracking: When is High Frame-Rate Best?
    project website ECCV 2012

Links