Learning to Design Soft Hands using Reward Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Bai, Xueqian, Hansen, Nicklas, Singh, Adabhav, Tolley, Michael T., Duan, Yan, Abbeel, Pieter, Wang, Xiaolong, Yi, Sha
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Bai, Xueqian
Hansen, Nicklas
Singh, Adabhav
Tolley, Michael T.
Duan, Yan
Abbeel, Pieter
Wang, Xiaolong
Yi, Sha
author_facet Bai, Xueqian
Hansen, Nicklas
Singh, Adabhav
Tolley, Michael T.
Duan, Yan
Abbeel, Pieter
Wang, Xiaolong
Yi, Sha
contents Soft robotic hands promise to provide compliant and safe interaction with objects and environments. However, designing soft hands to be both compliant and functional across diverse use cases remains challenging. Although co-design of hardware and control better couples morphology to behavior, the resulting search space is high-dimensional, and even simulation-based evaluation is computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a Cross-Entropy Method with Reward Model (CEM-RM) framework that efficiently optimizes tendon-driven soft robotic hands based on teleoperation control policy, reducing design evaluations by more than half compared to pure optimization while learning a distribution of optimized hand designs from pre-collected teleoperation data. We derive a design space for a soft robotic hand composed of flexural soft fingers and implement parallelized training in simulation. The optimized hands are then 3D-printed and deployed in the real world using both teleoperation data and real-time teleoperation. Experiments in both simulation and hardware demonstrate that our optimized design significantly outperforms baseline hands in grasping success rates across a diverse set of challenging objects.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_17086
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Design Soft Hands using Reward Models
Bai, Xueqian
Hansen, Nicklas
Singh, Adabhav
Tolley, Michael T.
Duan, Yan
Abbeel, Pieter
Wang, Xiaolong
Yi, Sha
Robotics
Soft robotic hands promise to provide compliant and safe interaction with objects and environments. However, designing soft hands to be both compliant and functional across diverse use cases remains challenging. Although co-design of hardware and control better couples morphology to behavior, the resulting search space is high-dimensional, and even simulation-based evaluation is computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a Cross-Entropy Method with Reward Model (CEM-RM) framework that efficiently optimizes tendon-driven soft robotic hands based on teleoperation control policy, reducing design evaluations by more than half compared to pure optimization while learning a distribution of optimized hand designs from pre-collected teleoperation data. We derive a design space for a soft robotic hand composed of flexural soft fingers and implement parallelized training in simulation. The optimized hands are then 3D-printed and deployed in the real world using both teleoperation data and real-time teleoperation. Experiments in both simulation and hardware demonstrate that our optimized design significantly outperforms baseline hands in grasping success rates across a diverse set of challenging objects.
title Learning to Design Soft Hands using Reward Models
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17086