Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation of Slender Cylindrical Objects through Deep Reinforcement Learning with Tactile Sensing

Abstract: Continuous in-hand manipulation is an important physical interaction skill, where tactile sensing provides indispensable contact information to enable dexterous manipulation of small objects. This work proposed a framework for end-to-end policy learning with tactile feedback and sim-to-real transfer, which achieved fine in-hand manipulation that controls the pose of a thin cylindrical object, such as a long stick, to track various continuous trajectories through multiple contacts of three fingertips of a dexterous robot hand with tactile sensor arrays. We estimated the central contact position between the stick and each fingertip from the high-dimensional tactile information and showed that the learned policies achieved effective manipulation performance with the processed tactile feedback. The policies were trained with deep reinforcement learning in simulation and successfully transferred to real-world experiments, using coordinated model calibration and domain randomization. We evaluated the effectiveness of tactile information via comparative studies and validated the sim-to-real performance through real-world experiments.