2023-12-02-grannen23a.md

title	section	openreview	abstract	layout	series	publisher	issn	id	month	tex_title	firstpage	lastpage	page	order	cycles	bibtex_author	author	date	address	container-title	volume	genre	issued	pdf	extras
Stabilize to Act: Learning to Coordinate for Bimanual Manipulation	Oral	86aMPJn6hX9F	Key to rich, dexterous manipulation in the real world is the ability to coordinate control across two hands. However, while the promise afforded by bimanual robotic systems is immense, constructing control policies for dual arm autonomous systems brings inherent difficulties. One such difficulty is the high-dimensionality of the bimanual action space, which adds complexity to both model-based and data-driven methods. We counteract this challenge by drawing inspiration from humans to propose a novel role assignment framework: a stabilizing arm holds an object in place to simplify the environment while an acting arm executes the task. We instantiate this framework with BimanUal Dexterity from Stabilization (BUDS), which uses a learned restabilizing classifier to alternate between updating a learned stabilization position to keep the environment unchanged, and accomplishing the task with an acting policy learned from demonstrations. We evaluate BUDS on four bimanual tasks of varying complexities on real-world robots, such as zipping jackets and cutting vegetables. Given only 20 demonstrations, BUDS achieves $76.9%$ task success across our task suite, and generalizes to out-of-distribution objects within a class with a $52.7%$ success rate. BUDS is $56.0%$ more successful than an unstructured baseline that instead learns a BC stabilizing policy due to the precision required of these complex tasks. Supplementary material and videos can be found at https://tinyurl.com/stabilizetoact.	inproceedings	Proceedings of Machine Learning Research	PMLR	2640-3498	grannen23a	0	Stabilize to Act: Learning to Coordinate for Bimanual Manipulation	563	576	563-576	563	false	Grannen, Jennifer and Wu, Yilin and Vu, Brandon and Sadigh, Dorsa	given family Jennifer Grannen given family Yilin Wu given family Brandon Vu given family Dorsa Sadigh	2023-12-02		Proceedings of The 7th Conference on Robot Learning	229	inproceedings	date-parts 2023 12 2	https://proceedings.mlr.press/v229/grannen23a/grannen23a.pdf