DexArt: Benchmarking Generalizable Dexterous Manipulation with
  Articulated Objects
Authors: name: Chen Bao; name: Helin Xu; name: Yuzhe Qin; name: Xiaolong Wang
Published: 2023-05-09 18:30:58

Abstract: To enable general-purpose robots, we will require the robot to operate daily
articulated objects as humans do. Current robot manipulation has heavily relied
on using a parallel gripper, which restricts the robot to a limited set of
objects. On the other hand, operating with a multi-finger robot hand will allow
better approximation to human behavior and enable the robot to operate on
diverse articulated objects. To this end, we propose a new benchmark called
DexArt, which involves Dexterous manipulation with Articulated objects in a
physical simulator. In our benchmark, we define multiple complex manipulation
tasks, and the robot hand will need to manipulate diverse articulated objects
within each task. Our main focus is to evaluate the generalizability of the
learned policy on unseen articulated objects. This is very challenging given
the high degrees of freedom of both hands and objects. We use Reinforcement
Learning with 3D representation learning to achieve generalization. Through
extensive studies, we provide new insights into how 3D representation learning
affects decision making in RL with 3D point cloud inputs. More details can be
found at https://www.chenbao.tech/dexart/.