Title: Adversarial Discriminative Sim-to-real Transfer of Visuo-motor Policies,
Abstract: Various approaches have been proposed to learn visuo-motor policies for
real-world robotic applications. One solution is first learning in simulation
then transferring to the real world. In the transfer, most existing approaches
need real-world images with labels. However, the labelling process is often
expensive or even impractical in many robotic applications. In this paper, we
propose an adversarial discriminative sim-to-real transfer approach to reduce
the cost of labelling real data. The effectiveness of the approach is
demonstrated with modular networks in a table-top object reaching task where a
7 DoF arm is controlled in velocity mode to reach a blue cuboid in clutter
through visual observations. The adversarial transfer approach reduced the
labelled real data requirement by 50%. Policies can be transferred to real
environments with only 93 labelled and 186 unlabelled real images. The
transferred visuo-motor policies are robust to novel (not seen in training)
objects in clutter and even a moving target, achieving a 97.8% success rate and
1.8 cm control accuracy.