MyoDex: A Generalizable Prior for Dexterous Manipulation
Authors: name: Vittorio Caggiano, name: Sudeep Dasari, name: Vikash Kumar

Human dexterity is a hallmark of motor control. Our hands can rapidly
synthesize new behaviors despite the complexity (multi-articular and
multi-joints, with 23 joints controlled by more than 40 muscles) of
musculoskeletal sensory-motor circuits. In this work, we take inspiration from
how human dexterity builds on a diversity of prior experiences, instead of
being acquired through a single task. Motivated by this observation, we set out
to develop agents that can build upon their previous experience to quickly
acquire new (previously unattainable) behaviors. Specifically, our approach
leverages multi-task learning to implicitly capture task-agnostic behavioral
priors (MyoDex) for human-like dexterity, using a physiologically realistic
human hand model - MyoHand. We demonstrate MyoDex's effectiveness in few-shot
generalization as well as positive transfer to a large repertoire of unseen
dexterous manipulation tasks. Agents leveraging MyoDex can solve approximately
3x more tasks, and 4x faster in comparison to a distillation baseline. While
prior work has synthesized single musculoskeletal control behaviors, MyoDex is
the first generalizable manipulation prior that catalyzes the learning of
dexterous physiological control across a large variety of contact-rich
behaviors. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our paradigms beyond
musculoskeletal control towards the acquisition of dexterity in 24 DoF Adroit
Hand. Website: https://sites.google.com/view/myodex