Learning Dexterous Object Handover

TL;DR

This paper presents a reinforcement learning approach for dexterous object handover using dual quaternion-based reward functions, achieving high success rates and robustness to object variations and perturbations.

Contribution

The work introduces a novel dual quaternion reward function for RL in dexterous handover, improving rotation handling and robustness over existing methods.

Findings

Achieved 94% success rate in object handover tasks.

Demonstrated robustness to unseen objects and perturbations.

Policy performance decreases minimally under real-world disturbances.

Abstract

Object handover is an important skill that we use daily when interacting with other humans. To deploy robots in collaborative setting, like houses, being able to receive and handing over objects safely and efficiently becomes a crucial skill. In this work, we demonstrate the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for dexterous object handover between two multi-finger hands. Key to this task is the use of a novel reward function based on dual quaternions to minimize the rotation distance, which outperforms other rotation representations such as Euler and rotation matrices. The robustness of the trained policy is experimentally evaluated by testing w.r.t. objects that are not included in the training distribution, and perturbations during the handover process. The results demonstrate that the trained policy successfully perform this task, achieving a total success rate of 94% in the best-case scenario after 100 experiments, thereby showing the robustness of our policy with novel objects. In addition, the best-case performance of the policy decreases by only 13.8% when the other robot moves during the handover, proving that our policy is also robust to this type of perturbation, which is common in real-world object handovers.