Dynamic Handover:
Throw and Catch with Bimanual Hands

1UC San Diego, 2Peking University

*Equal Contribution
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2023

Our Multi-Agent System: high-speed actions, precise collaboration, diverse object interactions!

Abstract

Humans throw and catch objects all the time. However, such a seemingly common skill introduces a lot of challenges for robots to achieve: The robots need to operate such dynamic actions at high-speed, collaborate precisely, and interact with diverse objects. In this paper, we design a system with two multi-finger hands attached to robot arms to solve this problem. We train our system using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in simulation and perform Sim2Real transfer to deploy on the real robots. To overcome the Sim2Real gap, we provide multiple novel algorithm designs including learning a trajectory prediction model for the object. Such a model can help the robot catcher has a real-time estimation of where the object will be heading, and then react accordingly. We conduct our experiments with multiple objects in the real-world system, and show significant improvements over multiple baselines.

Video

Visualization in the Real World

Tests on Basic Geometric Objects

Tests on Real-life Objects

Comparison with Baselines

Our Multi-Agent System

Baseline: w/o Multi-Agent and Goal Estimation

Our Multi-Agent System

Baseline: Open Loop Policy



Failure Cases

Bad Thrower

Bad Catcher Motion

Bad Catcher Motion

Fail to Estimate Goal



Perturbation Test

Orthogonal Perturbation

Test in Orthogonal Perturbation

Test in Orthogonal Perturbation

Opposing Perturbation

Test in Opposing Perturbation

Test in Opposing Perturbation

Along Perturbation

Test in Along Perturbation

Test in Along Perturbation



Visualization in Simulation

*Static blue object represents predefined throwing goal. Orange object represents estimated catching goal output by Goal Estimator.