CADRE: Dynamic Catching via Implicit Contact Descriptors and Task-Appropriate Recovery Affordances

Abstract:Real-world dexterous manipulation often encounters unexpected errors and disturbances, which can lead to catastrophic failures, such as dropping the manipulated object. To address this challenge, we focus on the problem of catching a falling object while it remains within grasping range and, importantly, resetting the system to a configuration favorable for resuming the primary manipulation task. We propose Contact-Aware Dynamic Recovery (CADRE), a reinforcement learning framework that incorporates a Neural Descriptor Field (NDF)-inspired module to extract implicit contact features. Building on these contact features, we introduce an Implicit Recovery Affordance function to encourage recovery to task-appropriate states. Compared to methods that rely solely on object pose or point cloud input, NDFs can directly reason about finger-object correspondence and better establish a recovery target for RL training. Our experiments show that incorporating contact features improves training efficiency, enhances convergence performance for RL training, and ultimately leads to more successful recoveries. Additionally, we demonstrate that CADRE can generalize zero-shot to unseen objects with different geometries.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2510.14768 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2510.14768v2 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.14768 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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