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In this work we propose an approach to learn a robust policy for solving the pivoting task. Recently, several model-free continuous control algorithms were shown to learn successful policies without prior knowledge of the dynamics of the task. However, obtaining successful policies required thousands to millions of training episodes, limiting the applicability of these approaches to real hardware. We developed a training procedure that allows us to use a simple custom simulator to learn policies robust to the mismatch of simulation vs robot. In our experiments, we demonstrate that the policy learned in the simulator is able to pivot the object to the desired target angle on the real robot. We also show generalization to an object with different inertia, shape, mass and friction properties than those used during training. This result is a step towards making model-free reinforcement learning available for solving robotics tasks via pre-training in simulators that offer only an imprecise match to the real-world dynamics., QC 20171023

This work addresses the problem of changing grasp configurations on objects with an unknown shape through in-hand manipulation. Our approach leverages shape priors,learned as deep generative models, to infer novel object shapesfrom partial visual sensing. The Dexterous Manipulation Graph method is extended to build upon incremental data and account for estimation uncertainty in searching a sequence of manipulation actions. We show that our approach successfully solves in-hand manipulation tasks with unknown objects, and demonstrate the validity of these solutions with robot experiments., QC 20191029