H-InDex: Visual Reinforcement Learning with Hand-Informed Representations for Dexterous Manipulation

Abstract

Human hands possess remarkable dexterity and have long served as a source of inspiration for robotic manipulation. In this work, we propose a human Hand-Informed visual representation learning framework to solve difficult Dexterous manipulation tasks (H-InDex). Our framework consists of three stages: (i) pre-training representations with 3D human hand pose estimation, (ii) offline adapting representations with self-supervised keypoint detection, and (iii) reinforcement learning with exponential moving average BatchNorm. The last two stages only modify 0.36% parameters of the pre-trained representation in total, ensuring the knowledge from pre-training is maintained to the full extent. We empirically study 12 challenging dexterous manipulation tasks and find that our method largely surpasses the previous state-of-the-art method and also the recent visual foundation models for motor control.