In-Hand Manipulation of Articulated Tools with Dexterous Robot Hands with Sim-to-Real Transfer

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Atar, Soofiyan, Huang, Daniel, Richter, Florian, Yip, Michael
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Atar, Soofiyan
Huang, Daniel
Richter, Florian
Yip, Michael
author_facet Atar, Soofiyan
Huang, Daniel
Richter, Florian
Yip, Michael
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) and sim-to-real transfer have advanced rigid-object manipulation. However, policies remain brittle for articulated mechanisms due to contact-rich dynamics that require both stable grasping and simultaneous free in-hand articulation. Furthermore, articulated objects and robot hands exhibit under-modeled joint phenomena such as friction, stiction, and backlash in real life that can increase the sim-to-real gap, and robot hands still fall short of idealized tactile sensing, both in terms of coverage, sensitivity, and specificity. In this paper, we present an original approach to learning dexterous in-hand manipulation of articulated tools that has reduced articulation and kinematic redundancy relative to the human hand. Our approach augments a simulation-trained base policy with a sensor-driven refinement learned from hardware demonstrations. This refinement conditions on proprioception and target articulation states while fusing whole-hand tactile and force-torque feedback with the policy's action intent through cross-attention. The resulting controller adapts online to instance-specific articulation properties, stabilizes contact interactions, and regulates internal forces under perturbations. We validate our method across diverse real-world tools, including scissors, pliers, minimally invasive surgical instruments, and staplers, demonstrating robust sim-to-real transfer, improved disturbance resilience, and generalization across structurally related articulated tools without precise physical modeling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_23075
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle In-Hand Manipulation of Articulated Tools with Dexterous Robot Hands with Sim-to-Real Transfer
Atar, Soofiyan
Huang, Daniel
Richter, Florian
Yip, Michael
Robotics
Reinforcement learning (RL) and sim-to-real transfer have advanced rigid-object manipulation. However, policies remain brittle for articulated mechanisms due to contact-rich dynamics that require both stable grasping and simultaneous free in-hand articulation. Furthermore, articulated objects and robot hands exhibit under-modeled joint phenomena such as friction, stiction, and backlash in real life that can increase the sim-to-real gap, and robot hands still fall short of idealized tactile sensing, both in terms of coverage, sensitivity, and specificity. In this paper, we present an original approach to learning dexterous in-hand manipulation of articulated tools that has reduced articulation and kinematic redundancy relative to the human hand. Our approach augments a simulation-trained base policy with a sensor-driven refinement learned from hardware demonstrations. This refinement conditions on proprioception and target articulation states while fusing whole-hand tactile and force-torque feedback with the policy's action intent through cross-attention. The resulting controller adapts online to instance-specific articulation properties, stabilizes contact interactions, and regulates internal forces under perturbations. We validate our method across diverse real-world tools, including scissors, pliers, minimally invasive surgical instruments, and staplers, demonstrating robust sim-to-real transfer, improved disturbance resilience, and generalization across structurally related articulated tools without precise physical modeling.
title In-Hand Manipulation of Articulated Tools with Dexterous Robot Hands with Sim-to-Real Transfer
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23075