Automated Design of Simple and Robust Manipulators for Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation Tasks using Evolutionary Strategies

In spite of substantial progress, robust and dexterous in-hand manipulation remains a robotics grand challenge. Recent research has shown that optimization of robot hand morphology for specific tasks can result in custom hand designs that are low-cost, easy to maintain, and highly capable. However, the resulting manipulation strategies may not be very robust or generalizable in real-world situations. This paper shows that robustness can be improved dramatically by optimizing controls instead of contact force / trajectories and by considering uncertainty explicitly during the optimization process. We present a evolutionary algorithm based pipeline for co-optimizing hand morphology and control strategy over families of problems and initial states in order to achieve robust in-hand manipulation. We demonstrate that this approach produces robust results which utilize all surfaces of the hand and surprising dynamic motions. We showcase the advantage of optimizing joint limit values to create robust designs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our approach is complementary to trajectory optimization based approaches and can be utilized to improve robustness of such results as well as to create custom hand designs from scratch. Results are shown for repositioning and reorienting diverse objects relative to the palm of the hand.