Twisting Lids Off with Two Hands

Toru Lin, Zhao-Heng Yin, Haozhi Qi, Pieter Abbeel, Jitendra Malik

Keywords: Bimanual Manipulation, Sim-to-Real, Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Manipulating objects with two multi-fingered hands has been a long-standing challenge in robotics, due to the contact-rich nature of many manipulation tasks and the complexity inherent in coordinating a high-dimensional bimanual system. In this work, we share novel insights into physical modeling, real-time perception, and reward design that enable policies trained in simulation using deep reinforcement learning (RL) to be effectively and efficiently transferred to the real world. Specifically, we consider the problem of twisting lids of various bottle-like objects with two hands, demonstrating policies with generalization capabilities across a diverse set of unseen objects as well as dynamic and dexterous behaviors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first sim-to-real RL system that enables such capabilities on bimanual multi-fingered hands.

Video: https://youtu.be/TaRva6UjrCo

Website: https://toruowo.github.io/bimanual-twist/

Student Paper: yes

Submission Number: 142