Get a Grip: Multi-Finger Grasp Evaluation at Scale Enables Robust Sim-to-Real Transfer

Abstract

This work explores conditions under which multi-finger grasping algorithms can attain robust sim-to-real transfer. While numerous large datasets facilitate learning generative models for multi-finger grasping at scale, reliable real-world dexterous grasping remains challenging, with most methods degrading when deployed on hardware. An alternate strategy is to use discriminative grasp evaluation models for grasp selection and refinement, conditioned on real-world sensor measurements. This paradigm has produced state-of-the-art results for vision-based parallel-jaw grasping, but remains unproven in the multi-finger setting. In this work, we find that existing datasets and methods have been insufficient for training discriminitive models for multi-finger grasping. To train grasp evaluators at scale, datasets must provide on the order of millions of grasps, including both positive and negative examples, with corresponding visual data resembling measurements at inference time. To that end, we release a new, open-source dataset of 3.5M grasps on 4.3K objects annotated with RGB images, point clouds, and trained NeRFs. Leveraging this dataset, we train vision-based grasp evaluators that outperform both analytic and generative modeling-based baselines on extensive simulated and real-world trials across a diverse range of objects. We show via numerous ablations that the key factor for performance is indeed the evaluator, and that its quality degrades as the dataset shrinks, demonstrating the importance of our new dataset. Project website at: https://sites.google.com/view/get-a-grip-dataset.