Sequential Dexterity: Chaining Dexterous Policies for Long-Horizon Manipulation

Yuanpei Chen, Chen Wang, Li Fei-Fei, Karen Liu

Keywords: Dexterous Manipulation, Reinforcement Learning, Long-Horizon Manipulation

TL;DR: We present Sequential Dexterity, a system that learns to chain multiple dexterous manipulation policies for tackling long-horizon manipulation tasks in both simulation and real-world.

Abstract: Many real-world manipulation tasks consist of a series of subtasks that are significantly different from one another. Such long-horizon, complex tasks highlight the potential of dexterous hands, which possess adaptability and versatility, capable of seamlessly transitioning between different modes of functionality without the need for re-grasping or external tools. However, the challenges arise due to the high-dimensional action space of dexterous hand and complex compositional dynamics of the long-horizon tasks. We present Sequential Dexterity, a general system based on reinforcement learning (RL) that chains multiple dexterous policies for achieving long-horizon task goals. The core of the system is a transition feasibility function that progressively finetunes the sub-policies for enhancing chaining success rate, while also enables autonomous policy-switching for recovery from failures and bypassing redundant stages. Despite being trained only in simulation with a few task objects, our system demonstrates generalization capability to novel object shapes and is able to zero-shot transfer to a real-world robot equipped with a dexterous hand. Code and videos are available at https://sequential-dexterity.github.io.

Student First Author: yes

Instructions: I have read the instructions for authors (https://corl2023.org/instructions-for-authors/)

Video: https://youtu.be/2mmqQYO4KlY

Website: https://sequential-dexterity.github.io

Code: https://github.com/sequential-dexterity/SeqDex