In real-world scenarios, objects often require repositioning and reorientation before they can be grasped, a process known as pre-grasp manipulation. Learning universal dexterous functional pre-grasp manipulation requires precise control over the relative position, orientation, and contact between the hand and object while generalizing to diverse dynamic scenarios with varying objects and goal poses. To address this challenge, we propose a teacher-student learning approach that utilizes a novel mutual reward, incentivizing agents to optimize three key criteria jointly. Additionally, we introduce a pipeline that employs a mixture-of-experts strategy to learn diverse manipulation policies, followed by a diffusion policy to capture complex action distributions from these experts. Our method achieves a success rate of 72.6\% across more than 30 object categories by leveraging extrinsic dexterity and adjusting from feedback.

Abstract-- Many objects such as tools and household items can be used only if grasped in a very specific way--grasped functionally. Often, a direct functional grasp is not possible, though. We propose a method for learning a dexterous pregrasp manipulation policy to achieve human-like functional grasps using deep reinforcement learning. We introduce a dense multi-component reward function that enables learning a single policy, capable of dexterous pre-grasp manipulation of novel instances of several known object categories with an anthropomorphic hand. The policy is learned purely by means of reinforcement learning from scratch, without any expert demonstrations, and implicitly learns to reposition and reorient objects of complex shapes to achieve given functional grasps. Learning is done on a single GPU in less than three hours.