학술논문

Bi-Touch: Bimanual Tactile Manipulation With Sim-to-Real Deep Reinforcement Learning
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE. 8(9):5472-5479 Sep, 2023
Subject
Robotics and Control Systems
Computing and Processing
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Robots
Robot sensing systems
Task analysis
Sensors
Tactile sensors
Training
Service robots
Force and tactile sensing
reinforcement learning
Language
ISSN
2377-3766
2377-3774
Abstract
Bimanual manipulation with tactile feedback will be key to human-level robot dexterity. However, this topic is less explored than single-arm settings, partly due to the availability of suitable hardware along with the complexity of designing effective controllers for tasks with relatively large state-action spaces. Here we introduce a dual-arm tactile robotic system (Bi-Touch) based on the Tactile Gym 2.0 setup that integrates two affordable industrial-level robot arms with low-cost high-resolution tactile sensors (TacTips). We present a suite of bimanual manipulation tasks tailored towards tactile feedback: bi-pushing, bi-reorienting, and bi-gathering. To learn effective policies, we introduce appropriate reward functions for these tasks and propose a novel goal-update mechanism with deep reinforcement learning. We also apply these policies to real-world settings with a tactile sim-to-real approach. Our analysis highlights and addresses some challenges met during the sim-to-real application, e.g. the learned policy tended to squeeze an object in the bi-reorienting task due to the sim-to-real gap. Finally, we demonstrate the generalizability and robustness of this system by experimenting with different unseen objects with applied perturbations in the real world.