  Dexterous in-hand manipulation for a multi-fingered anthropomorphic hand is
extremely difficult because of the high-dimensional state and action spaces,
rich contact patterns between the fingers and objects. Even though deep
reinforcement learning has made moderate progress and demonstrated its strong
potential for manipulation, it is still faced with certain challenges, such as
large-scale data collection and high sample complexity. Especially, for some
slight change scenes, it always needs to re-collect vast amounts of data and
carry out numerous iterations of fine-tuning. Remarkably, humans can quickly
transfer learned manipulation skills to different scenarios with little
supervision. Inspired by human flexible transfer learning capability, we
propose a novel dexterous in-hand manipulation progressive transfer learning
framework (PTL) based on efficiently utilizing the collected trajectories and
the source-trained dynamics model. This framework adopts progressive neural
networks for dynamics model transfer learning on samples selected by a new
samples selection method based on dynamics properties, rewards and scores of
the trajectories. Experimental results on contact-rich anthropomorphic hand
manipulation tasks show that our method can efficiently and effectively learn
in-hand manipulation skills with a few online attempts and adjustment learning
under the new scene. Compared to learning from scratch, our method can reduce
training time costs by 95%.
