The Robot Report simple grippers new tricks Teaching

Using its environment, even a simple gripper can perform complex manipulation tasks.

According to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), even simple robotic grippers can solve some complex manipulation tasks. Sometimes they just need a little help om their environment by pushing an object against a table or a wall.

This is known as “Extrinsic Dexterity.” The CMU team said previous work in extrinsic dexterity used careful assumptions about contacts that impose restrictions on robot design, robot motions, and the variations of the physical parameters. They tried to improve upon these limitations by developing a system based on reinforcement learning (RL).

They studied the task of “Occluded Grasping,” which aims to grasp an object in configurations that are initially occluded; the robot needs to move the object into a configuration om which these grasps can be achieved. The policy learns emergent behaviors of pushing the object against the wall to rotate and then grasp it without additional reward terms on extrinsic dexterity.