Randomized-to-Canonical Model Predictive Control for Real-World Visual Robotic Manipulation

Abstract

Many works have recently explored Sim-to-real transferable visual model predictive control (MPC). However, such works are limited to one-shot transfer, where real-world data must be collected once to perform the sim-to-real transfer, which remains a significant human effort in transferring the models learned in simulations to new domains in the real world.To alleviate this problem, we first propose a novel modellearning framework called Kalman Randomized-to-Canonical Model (KRC-model). This framework is capable of extracting task-relevant intrinsic features and their dynamics from randomized images. We then propose Kalman Randomized-to-Canonical Model Predictive Control (KRC-MPC) as a zeroshot sim-to-real transferable visual MPC using KRC-model. The effectiveness of our method is evaluated through a valve rotation task by a robot hand in both simulation and the real world, and a block mating task in simulation. The experimental results show that KRC-MPC can be applied to various real domains and tasks in a zero-shot manner.

A Survey on Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Robotic Manipulation

“…The Kalman Randomized-to-Canonical Model, a zero-shot sim-to-real transferable visual model predictive control (MPC) technique, is presented by Yamanokuchi et al [ 129 ]. The suggested system utilizes the KRC model to extract intrinsic characteristics and dynamics that are task-relevant from randomized pictures.…”