In sim-to-real Reinforcement Learning (RL), a policy is trained in a simulated environment and then deployed on the physical system. The main challenge of sim-to-real RL is to overcome the reality gap - the discrepancies between the real world and its simulated counterpart. Using generic geometric representations, such as convex decomposition, triangular mesh, signed distance field can improve simulation fidelity, and thus potentially narrow the reality gap. Common to these approaches is that many contact points are generated for geometrically-complex objects, which slows down simulation and may cause numerical instability. Contact reduction methods address these issues by limiting the number of contact points, but the validity of these methods for sim-to-real RL has not been confirmed. In this paper, we present a contact reduction method with bounded stiffness to improve the simulation accuracy. Our experiments show that the proposed method critically enables training RL policy for a tight-clearance double pin insertion task and successfully deploying the policy on a rigid, position-controlled physical robot.

This paper explores the idea that skillful assembly is best represented as dynamic sequences of Manipulation Primitives, and that such sequences can be automatically discovered by Reinforcement Learning. Manipulation Primitives, such as "Move down until contact", "Slide along x while maintaining contact with the surface", have enough complexity to keep the search tree shallow, yet are generic enough to generalize across a wide range of assembly tasks. Moreover, the additional "semantics" of the Manipulation Primitives make them more robust in sim2real and against model/environment variations and uncertainties, as compared to more elementary actions. Policies are learned in simulation, and then transferred onto a physical platform. Direct sim2real transfer (without retraining in real) achieves excellent success rates on challenging assembly tasks, such as round peg insertion with 0.04mm clearance or square peg insertion with large hole position/orientation estimation errors.