TDC: Sim-to-Real Transferable Directional Compliance for Contact-Rich Manipulation
The work addresses challenges in transferring contact-rich manipulation skills from simulation to reality by focusing on force direction rather than absolute force magnitudes. By predicting the dynamics-invariant normal force direction, policies can be trained solely on simulation data. These learned policies then drive a lightweight, manually tuned admittance controller in the real world for adaptive compliance, achieving high success rates across various contact tasks.