“Solving Rubik’s Cube With a Robot Hand”, 2019-10-16 (; similar):
We demonstrate that models trained only in simulation can be used to solve a manipulation problem of unprecedented complexity on a real robot.
This is made possible by two key components: a novel algorithm, which we call automatic domain randomization (ADR) and a robot platform built for machine learning. ADR automatically generates a distribution over randomized environments of ever-increasing difficulty.
Control policies and vision state estimators trained with ADR exhibit vastly improved sim2real transfer. For control policies, memory-augmented models trained on an ADR-generated distribution of environments show clear signs of emergent meta-learning at test time. The combination of ADR with our custom robot platform allows us to solve a Rubik’s cube with a humanoid robot hand, which involves both control and state estimation problems.
Videos summarizing our results are available.
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