1. FORGE: Force-Guided Exploration for Robust Contact-Rich Manipulation under Uncertainty
- Author
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Noseworthy, Michael, Tang, Bingjie, Wen, Bowen, Handa, Ankur, Roy, Nicholas, Fox, Dieter, Ramos, Fabio, Narang, Yashraj, and Akinola, Iretiayo
- Subjects
Computer Science - Robotics - Abstract
We present FORGE, a method that enables sim-to-real transfer of contact-rich manipulation policies in the presence of significant pose uncertainty. FORGE combines a force threshold mechanism with a dynamics randomization scheme during policy learning in simulation, to enable the robust transfer of the learned policies to the real robot. At deployment, FORGE policies, conditioned on a maximum allowable force, adaptively perform contact-rich tasks while respecting the specified force threshold, regardless of the controller gains. Additionally, FORGE autonomously predicts a termination action once the task has succeeded. We demonstrate that FORGE can be used to learn a variety of robust contact-rich policies, enabling multi-stage assembly of a planetary gear system, which requires success across three assembly tasks: nut-threading, insertion, and gear meshing. Project website can be accessed at https://noseworm.github.io/forge/.
- Published
- 2024