Variable Impedance Skill Learning for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Contact-rich manipulation tasks remain a hard problem in robotics that requires interaction with unstructured environments. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is one potential solution to such problems, as it has been successfully demonstrated on complex continuous control tasks. Nevertheless, current state-of-the-art methods require policy training in simulation to prevent undesired behavior and later domain transfer even for simple skills involving contact. In this paper, we address the problem of learning contact-rich manipulation policies by extending an existing skill-based RL framework with a variable impedance action space. Our method leverages a small set of suboptimal demonstration trajectories and learns from both position, but also crucially impedance-space information. We evaluate our method on a number of peg-in-hole task variants with a Franka Panda arm and demonstrate that learning variable impedance actions for RL in Cartesian space can be deployed directly on the real robot, without resorting to learning in simulation.