Learning Dexterous Object Handover

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/Report › Conference contribution › Contributed › peer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Object handover is an important skill that we use daily when interacting with other humans. To deploy robots in collaborative setting, like houses, being able to receive and handing over objects safely and efficiently becomes a crucial skill. In this work, we demonstrate the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for dexterous object handover between two multi-finger hands. Key to this task is the use of a novel reward function based on dual quaternions to minimize the rotation distance, which outperforms other rotation representations such as Euler and rotation matrices. The robustness of the trained policy is experimentally evaluated by testing w.r.t. objects that are not included in the training distribution, and perturbations during the handover process. The results demonstrate that the trained policy successfully perform this task, achieving a total success rate of 94% in the best-case scenario after 100 experiments, thereby showing the robustness of our policy with novel objects. In addition, the best-case performance of the trained policy decreases by only 13.8% when the other robot moves during the handover, proving that our policy is also robust to this type of perturbation, which is common in real-world object handovers. Code and videos can be found here.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2025 34th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, RO-MAN 2025
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages380-387
Number of pages8
ISBN (electronic)979-8-3315-8771-0
ISBN (print)979-8-3315-8772-7
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2025
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesIEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Communication, RO-MAN
ISSN1944-9445

Conference

Title34th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication
SubtitleShaping our hybrid future with robots together
Abbreviated titleRO-MAN 2025
Conference number34
Duration25 - 29 August 2025
Website
LocationEindhoven University of Technology & Online
CityEindhoven
CountryNetherlands

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0001-9430-8433/work/223387190