Any-ttach: Quick End-effector Swapping Enables Manipulation Dexterity with Simplicity
This work offers an alternative approach to robotic manipulation dexterity for researchers and practitioners, suggesting that rapid tool exchange can expand capabilities without requiring increasingly complex end-effectors.
This paper introduces Any-ttach, a tool-centric manipulation framework that enables robotic dexterity through quick end-effector swapping rather than complex multi-fingered hands. The system combines an automatic swapping mechanism, a human demonstration device, and a task planning framework, demonstrating improved tool-swapping reliability, increased demonstration efficiency, and reduced tool-pose variability across diverse tool-use skills.
Robotic manipulation dexterity is often pursued by building increasingly complex high-DoF multifingered hands. While many robotic hands are designed to replicate human morphology, the functional role of human hands suggests a different perspective: much of their complexity may exist to enable tool use and tool making. This observation motivates Any-ttach, a tool-centric manipulation framework that treats quick end-effector swapping as a mechanism for dexterity with simplicity. Any-ttach combines a low-cost automatic swapping mechanism for an open-close robot interface, a handheld device for collecting human demonstrations, and a task planning framework that composes learned, parameterized, and planned tool-use skills. The system supports diverse tools and end-effector modules, including daily tools, articulated tools such as scissors, Fin Ray fingers, and a low-cost anthropomorphic hand, through the same shared interface. Our experiments show that Any-ttach improves tool-swapping reliability, increases demonstration efficiency, reduces tool-pose variability, and supports diverse tool-use skills. In two long-horizon tasks, making a sandwich and preparing a cucumber, Any-ttach executes six tool-use subskills through end-effector switching and execution monitoring. These results suggest that robots can expand manipulation capability not only through more complex end-effectors, but also through rapidly exchangeable tools and end-effector modules. More details and videos are available at https://any-ttach.github.io/.