Mr WANG Fangyuan, a PolyU PhD student, was part of a research team that was crowned champion at the “Domestic Robotics Track” of the Second Zhuhai International Dexterous Manipulation Challenge & Embodied Intelligence Industry Conference held in Zhuhai, China, from 29 to 30 October 2025. The research team, named “Omni-Mani”, was one of the 20 top teams that proceeded to the final round. The team successfully defended its championship title in the track. For its victory, the team received a cash prize of RMB500,000 and a letter of intent for RMB6 million in supporting investment.

Focusing 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.

The winning team included leader Prof. ZHOU Peng from Great Bay University, core member Prof. QI Jiaming from Northeast Forestry University and researcher Mr WANG, a PhD student from PolyU’s Department of Mechanical Engineering enrolled in the Collaborative PhD Training Programme at the National University of Singapore.

Both Prof. ZHOU and Prof. QI are former PhD students of Prof. David NAVARRO, Associate Professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at PolyU. They graduated from their doctoral programmes in 2023 and 2020, respectively. Mr WANG is currently supervised by Prof. NAVARRO.

The team demonstrated precise human-robot collaborative manipulation in a “kitchen-cooking scenario”. Their system excelled in tasks ranging from utensil recognition and grasping to human-robot handover. The system continuously optimised teleoperation performance using skills derived from a 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.