TransDex: Pre-training Visuo-Tactile Policy with Point Cloud Reconstruction for Dexterous Manipulation of Transparent Objects

Abstract

Dexterous manipulation enables complex tasks but suffers from self-occlusion, severe depth noise, and depth information loss when manipulating transparent objects. To solve this problem, this paper proposes TransDex, a 3D visuo-tactile fusion motor policy based on point cloud reconstruction pre-training. Specifically, we first propose a self-supervised point cloud reconstruction pre-training approach based on Transformer. This method accurately recovers the 3D structure of objects from interactive point clouds of dexterous hands, even when random noise and large-scale masking are added. Building on this, TransDex is constructed in which perceptual encoding adopts a fine-grained hierarchical scheme and multi-round attention mechanisms adaptively fuse features of the robotic arm and dexterous hand to enable differentiated motion prediction. Results from transparent object manipulation experiments conducted on a real robotic system demonstrate that TransDex outperforms existing baseline methods. Further analysis validates the generalization capabilities of TransDex and the effectiveness of its individual components.