Tactile Sim-to-Real Policy Transfer via Real-to-Sim Image Translation
This work addresses the challenge of safe and efficient policy acquisition for tactile robotics, though it is incremental as it builds on existing simulation and translation techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of transferring reinforcement learning policies from simulation to real robots using tactile sensing by developing a suite of simulated environments with optical tactile sensors and a data-driven translation method, achieving zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on physically-interactive tasks.
Simulation has recently become key for deep reinforcement learning to safely and efficiently acquire general and complex control policies from visual and proprioceptive inputs. Tactile information is not usually considered despite its direct relation to environment interaction. In this work, we present a suite of simulated environments tailored towards tactile robotics and reinforcement learning. A simple and fast method of simulating optical tactile sensors is provided, where high-resolution contact geometry is represented as depth images. Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) is used to learn successful policies across all considered tasks. A data-driven approach enables translation of the current state of a real tactile sensor to corresponding simulated depth images. This policy is implemented within a real-time control loop on a physical robot to demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real policy transfer on several physically-interactive tasks requiring a sense of touch.