Prof. David Navarro’s Team Secures Championship at the 2nd Zhuhai International Dexterous Manipulation Challenge

On October 30, 2025, the Second Zhuhai International Dexterous Manipulation Challenge & Embodied Intelligence Industry Conference concluded at the Zhuhai International Convention & Exhibition Center. Competing against 20 top teams from around the globe, the "Omni-Mani" team, led by Prof. Zhou Peng, a 2023 PhD graduate supervised by Prof. David Navarro of the PolyU Department of Mechanical Engineering, successfully defended its championship in the "Domestic Robotics Track".  The victory comes with a RMB 500,000 cash prize and a RMB 6 million letter of intent for supporting investment.

Notably, the "Omni-Mani" team is composed of Prof. Navarro's former and current doctoral students, demonstrating the enduring impact of his mentorship. The team includes leader Prof. Zhou Peng from Great Bay University, core member Prof. Qi Jiaming from Northeast Forestry University, and Researcher Wang Fangyuan from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Centered on the theme "Dexterous New Force, Intelligently Creating the Future," this year's challenge was an important platform for advancing embodied intelligence. The competition adhered to an "application-oriented" principle, featuring "Production" and "Domestic" tracks.

In the "kitchen cooking" scenario, the team demonstrated precise human-robot collaborative manipulation. Their system excelled at tasks from utensil recognition and grasping to human-robot handover. It continuously optimized teleoperation performance using skills derived from low-dimensional representation and integrated a force-feedback mechanism to prevent object damage. This stable and sophisticated performance earned the team the competition's highest score.