Transferable Trial-Minimizing Progressive Peg-in-hole Model

Abstract

Peg-in-hole is a fine-level manipulation task that requires highly precise location and the normal direction of the hole, which is beyond state-of-the-art object detectors' capability. Therefore, we propose a novel method that trains a robot arm to progressively search for the right inserting pose through trials with both force feedback and visual inputs. Under a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, an agent trying to minimize the number of trials is learned based on the sequentially estimated relative poses with regard to the correct inserting pose. Moreover, our learned dynamics model is transferable. Thanks to our context-independent force and visual feature design, our pre-trained model can be finetuned efficiently for another unseen peg-in-hole case. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.