Estimator-Coupled Reinforcement Learning for Robust Purely Tactile In-Hand Manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Röstel, Lennart, Pitz, Johannes, Sievers, Leon, Bäuml, Berthold
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Röstel, Lennart
Pitz, Johannes
Sievers, Leon
Bäuml, Berthold
author_facet Röstel, Lennart
Pitz, Johannes
Sievers, Leon
Bäuml, Berthold
contents This paper identifies and addresses the problems with naively combining (reinforcement) learning-based controllers and state estimators for robotic in-hand manipulation. Specifically, we tackle the challenging task of purely tactile, goal-conditioned, dextrous in-hand reorientation with the hand pointing downwards. Due to the limited sensing available, many control strategies that are feasible in simulation when having full knowledge of the object's state do not allow for accurate state estimation. Hence, separately training the controller and the estimator and combining the two at test time leads to poor performance. We solve this problem by coupling the control policy to the state estimator already during training in simulation. This approach leads to more robust state estimation and overall higher performance on the task while maintaining an interpretability advantage over end-to-end policy learning. With our GPU-accelerated implementation, learning from scratch takes a median training time of only 6.5 hours on a single, low-cost GPU. In simulation experiments with the DLR-Hand II and for four significantly different object shapes, we provide an in-depth analysis of the performance of our approach. We demonstrate the successful sim2real transfer by rotating the four objects to all 24 orientations in the $π/2$ discretization of SO(3), which has never been achieved for such a diverse set of shapes. Finally, our method can reorient a cube consecutively to nine goals (median), which was beyond the reach of previous methods in this challenging setting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_04060
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Estimator-Coupled Reinforcement Learning for Robust Purely Tactile In-Hand Manipulation
Röstel, Lennart
Pitz, Johannes
Sievers, Leon
Bäuml, Berthold
Robotics
Machine Learning
This paper identifies and addresses the problems with naively combining (reinforcement) learning-based controllers and state estimators for robotic in-hand manipulation. Specifically, we tackle the challenging task of purely tactile, goal-conditioned, dextrous in-hand reorientation with the hand pointing downwards. Due to the limited sensing available, many control strategies that are feasible in simulation when having full knowledge of the object's state do not allow for accurate state estimation. Hence, separately training the controller and the estimator and combining the two at test time leads to poor performance. We solve this problem by coupling the control policy to the state estimator already during training in simulation. This approach leads to more robust state estimation and overall higher performance on the task while maintaining an interpretability advantage over end-to-end policy learning. With our GPU-accelerated implementation, learning from scratch takes a median training time of only 6.5 hours on a single, low-cost GPU. In simulation experiments with the DLR-Hand II and for four significantly different object shapes, we provide an in-depth analysis of the performance of our approach. We demonstrate the successful sim2real transfer by rotating the four objects to all 24 orientations in the $π/2$ discretization of SO(3), which has never been achieved for such a diverse set of shapes. Finally, our method can reorient a cube consecutively to nine goals (median), which was beyond the reach of previous methods in this challenging setting.
title Estimator-Coupled Reinforcement Learning for Robust Purely Tactile In-Hand Manipulation
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.04060