  Key to rich, dexterous manipulation in the real world is the ability to
coordinate control across two hands. However, while the promise afforded by
bimanual robotic systems is immense, constructing control policies for dual arm
autonomous systems brings inherent difficulties. One such difficulty is the
high-dimensionality of the bimanual action space, which adds complexity to both
model-based and data-driven methods. We counteract this challenge by drawing
inspiration from humans to propose a novel role assignment framework: a
stabilizing arm holds an object in place to simplify the environment while an
acting arm executes the task. We instantiate this framework with BimanUal
Dexterity from Stabilization (BUDS), which uses a learned restabilizing
classifier to alternate between updating a learned stabilization position to
keep the environment unchanged, and accomplishing the task with an acting
policy learned from demonstrations. We evaluate BUDS on four bimanual tasks of
varying complexities on real-world robots, such as zipping jackets and cutting
vegetables. Given only 20 demonstrations, BUDS achieves 76.9% task success
across our task suite, and generalizes to out-of-distribution objects within a
class with a 52.7% success rate. BUDS is 56.0% more successful than an
unstructured baseline that instead learns a BC stabilizing policy due to the
precision required of these complex tasks. Supplementary material and videos
can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/stabilizetoact .
