Vegetable Peeling: A Case Study in Constrained Dexterous Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper explores constrained dexterous manipulation for food peeling, developing a learning-based reorientation controller that enables effective peeling by addressing specific manipulation constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a simple system for learning a reorientation controller tailored for constrained food peeling tasks, bridging manipulation and downstream application.

Findings

Successful learning of reorientation controller for peeling

Effective handling of manipulation constraints in food peeling

Demonstrated feasibility of applying dexterous manipulation to downstream tasks

Abstract

Recent studies have made significant progress in addressing dexterous manipulation problems, particularly in in-hand object reorientation. However, there are few existing works that explore the potential utilization of developed dexterous manipulation controllers for downstream tasks. In this study, we focus on constrained dexterous manipulation for food peeling. Food peeling presents various constraints on the reorientation controller, such as the requirement for the hand to securely hold the object after reorientation for peeling. We propose a simple system for learning a reorientation controller that facilitates the subsequent peeling task. Videos are available at: https://taochenshh.github.io/projects/veg-peeling.