Leveraging Extrinsic Dexterity for Occluded Grasping on Grasp Constraining Walls

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that leverages extrinsic contacts with environmental features like walls to enable occluded grasping, demonstrating effective sim-to-real transfer and generalization across multiple objects.

Contribution

It proposes a novel RL-based approach combining high-level policy and CVAE-guided location inference for robust occluded grasping in complex environments.

Findings

High success rates in real-world tests across six objects

Effective generalization through domain randomization

Robust sim-to-real transfer demonstrated

Abstract

This study addresses the problem of occluded grasping, where primary grasp configurations of an object are not available due to occlusion with environment. Simple parallel grippers often struggle with such tasks due to limited dexterity and actuation constraints. Prior works have explored object pose reorientation such as pivoting by utilizing extrinsic contacts between an object and an environment feature like a wall, to make the object graspable. However, such works often assume the presence of a short wall, and this assumption may not always hold in real-world scenarios. If the wall available for interaction is too large or too tall, the robot may still fail to grasp the object even after pivoting, and the robot must combine different types of actions to grasp. To address this, we propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) framework. We use Q-learning to train a high-level policy that selects the type of action expected to yield the highest reward. The selected low-level skill then samples a specific robot action in continuous space. To guide the robot to an appropriate location for executing the selected action, we adopt a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE). We condition the CVAE on the object point cloud and the skill ID, enabling it to infer a suitable location based on the object geometry and the selected skill. To promote generalization, we apply domain randomization during the training of low-level skills. The RL policy is trained entirely in simulation with a box-like object and deployed to six objects in real world. We conduct experiments to evaluate our method and demonstrate both its generalizability and robust sim-to-real transfer performance with promising success rates.