FACTR: Force-Attending Curriculum Training for Contact-Rich Policy Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Liu, Jason Jingzhou, Li, Yulong, Shaw, Kenneth, Tao, Tony, Salakhutdinov, Ruslan, Pathak, Deepak
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Liu, Jason Jingzhou
Li, Yulong
Shaw, Kenneth
Tao, Tony
Salakhutdinov, Ruslan
Pathak, Deepak
author_facet Liu, Jason Jingzhou
Li, Yulong
Shaw, Kenneth
Tao, Tony
Salakhutdinov, Ruslan
Pathak, Deepak
contents Many contact-rich tasks humans perform, such as box pickup or rolling dough, rely on force feedback for reliable execution. However, this force information, which is readily available in most robot arms, is not commonly used in teleoperation and policy learning. Consequently, robot behavior is often limited to quasi-static kinematic tasks that do not require intricate force-feedback. In this paper, we first present a low-cost, intuitive, bilateral teleoperation setup that relays external forces of the follower arm back to the teacher arm, facilitating data collection for complex, contact-rich tasks. We then introduce FACTR, a policy learning method that employs a curriculum which corrupts the visual input with decreasing intensity throughout training. The curriculum prevents our transformer-based policy from over-fitting to the visual input and guides the policy to properly attend to the force modality. We demonstrate that by fully utilizing the force information, our method significantly improves generalization to unseen objects by 43\% compared to baseline approaches without a curriculum. Video results, codebases, and instructions at https://jasonjzliu.com/factr/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_17432
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FACTR: Force-Attending Curriculum Training for Contact-Rich Policy Learning
Liu, Jason Jingzhou
Li, Yulong
Shaw, Kenneth
Tao, Tony
Salakhutdinov, Ruslan
Pathak, Deepak
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Many contact-rich tasks humans perform, such as box pickup or rolling dough, rely on force feedback for reliable execution. However, this force information, which is readily available in most robot arms, is not commonly used in teleoperation and policy learning. Consequently, robot behavior is often limited to quasi-static kinematic tasks that do not require intricate force-feedback. In this paper, we first present a low-cost, intuitive, bilateral teleoperation setup that relays external forces of the follower arm back to the teacher arm, facilitating data collection for complex, contact-rich tasks. We then introduce FACTR, a policy learning method that employs a curriculum which corrupts the visual input with decreasing intensity throughout training. The curriculum prevents our transformer-based policy from over-fitting to the visual input and guides the policy to properly attend to the force modality. We demonstrate that by fully utilizing the force information, our method significantly improves generalization to unseen objects by 43\% compared to baseline approaches without a curriculum. Video results, codebases, and instructions at https://jasonjzliu.com/factr/
title FACTR: Force-Attending Curriculum Training for Contact-Rich Policy Learning
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17432