Papers › Tactile Sim-to-Real Policy Transfer via Real-to-Sim Image Translation

Tactile Sim-to-Real Policy Transfer via Real-to-Sim Image Translation

16 Jun 2021arXiv:2106.08796archive 2025-07-28

Alex Church, John Lloyd, Raia Hadsell, Nathan F. Lepora

Simulation has recently become key for deep reinforcement learning to safely and efficiently acquire general and complex control policies from visual and proprioceptive inputs. Tactile information is not usually considered despite its direct relation to environment interaction. In this work, we present a suite of simulated environments tailored towards tactile robotics and reinforcement learning. A simple and fast method of simulating optical tactile sensors is provided, where high-resolution contact geometry is represented as depth images. Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) is used to learn successful policies across all considered tasks. A data-driven approach enables translation of the current state of a real tactile sensor to corresponding simulated depth images. This policy is implemented within a real-time control loop on a physical robot to demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real policy transfer on several physically-interactive tasks requiring a sense of touch.

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ac-93/tactile_gym officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubGPL-3.0 report
ac-93/tactile_gym_servo_control mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Deep Reinforcement LearningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)Translationreinforcement-learning

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