Grasp Anything: Combining Teacher-Augmented Policy Gradient Learning with Instance Segmentation to Grasp Arbitrary Objects

Interactive grasping from clutter, akin to human dexterity, is one of the longest-standing problems in robot learn- ing. Challenges stem from the intricacies of visual perception, the demand for precise motor skills, and the complex interplay between the two. In this work, we present Teacher-Augmented Policy Gradient (TAPG), a novel two-stage learning framework that synergizes reinforcement learning and policy distillation. After training a teacher policy to master the motor control based on object pose information, TAPG facilitates guided, yet adaptive, learning of a sensorimotor policy, based on object segmentation. We zero-shot transfer from simulation to a real robot by using Segment Anything Model for promptable object segmentation. Our trained policies adeptly grasp a wide variety of objects from cluttered scenarios in simulation and the real world based on human-understandable prompts. Furthermore, we show robust zero-shot transfer to novel objects. Videos of our experiments are available at https://maltemosbach. github.io/grasp_anything.