Sequential Dexterity: Chaining Dexterous Policies for Long-Horizon
  Manipulation
Authors: name: Yuanpei Chen; name: Chen Wang; name: Li Fei-Fei; name: C. Karen Liu
Published: 2023-09-02 16:55:48

Abstract: Many real-world manipulation tasks consist of a series of subtasks that are
significantly different from one another. Such long-horizon, complex tasks
highlight the potential of dexterous hands, which possess adaptability and
versatility, capable of seamlessly transitioning between different modes of
functionality without the need for re-grasping or external tools. However, the
challenges arise due to the high-dimensional action space of dexterous hand and
complex compositional dynamics of the long-horizon tasks. We present Sequential
Dexterity, a general system based on reinforcement learning (RL) that chains
multiple dexterous policies for achieving long-horizon task goals. The core of
the system is a transition feasibility function that progressively finetunes
the sub-policies for enhancing chaining success rate, while also enables
autonomous policy-switching for recovery from failures and bypassing redundant
stages. Despite being trained only in simulation with a few task objects, our
system demonstrates generalization capability to novel object shapes and is
able to zero-shot transfer to a real-world robot equipped with a dexterous
hand. More details and video results could be found at
https://sequential-dexterity.github.io