2023-12-02-han23a.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
On the Utility of Koopman Operator Theory in Learning Dexterous Manipulation Skills	Oral	pw-OTIYrGa	Despite impressive dexterous manipulation capabilities enabled by learning-based approaches, we are yet to witness widespread adoption beyond well-resourced laboratories. This is likely due to practical limitations, such as significant computational burden, inscrutable learned behaviors, sensitivity to initialization, and the considerable technical expertise required for implementation. In this work, we investigate the utility of Koopman operator theory in alleviating these limitations. Koopman operators are simple yet powerful control-theoretic structures to represent complex nonlinear dynamics as linear systems in higher dimensions. Motivated by the fact that complex nonlinear dynamics underlie dexterous manipulation, we develop a Koopman operator-based imitation learning framework to learn the desired motions of both the robotic hand and the object simultaneously. We show that Koopman operators are surprisingly effective for dexterous manipulation and offer a number of unique benefits. Notably, policies can be learned analytically, drastically reducing computation burden and eliminating sensitivity to initialization and the need for painstaking hyperparameter optimization. Our experiments reveal that a Koopman operator-based approach can perform comparably to state-of-the-art imitation learning algorithms in terms of success rate and sample efficiency, while being an order of magnitude faster. Policy videos can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/view/kodex-corl.	inproceedings	Proceedings of Machine Learning Research	PMLR	2640-3498	han23a	0	On the Utility of Koopman Operator Theory in Learning Dexterous Manipulation Skills	106	126	106-126	106	false	Han, Yunhai and Xie, Mandy and Zhao, Ye and Ravichandar, Harish	given family Yunhai Han given family Mandy Xie given family Ye Zhao given family Harish Ravichandar	2023-12-02		Proceedings of The 7th Conference on Robot Learning	229	inproceedings	date-parts 2023 12 2	https://proceedings.mlr.press/v229/han23a/han23a.pdf