Where to Touch, How to Contact: Hierarchical RL-MPC Framework for Geometry-Aware Long-Horizon Dexterous Manipulation

Abstract: A key challenge in contact-rich dexterous manipulation is the need to jointly reason over geometry, kinematic constraints, and intricate, nonsmooth contact dynamics. End-to-end visuomotor policies bypass this structure, but often require large amounts of data, transfer poorly from simulation to reality, and generalize weakly across tasks/embodiments. We address those limitations by leveraging a simple insight: dexterous manipulation is inherently hierarchical - at a high level, a robot decides where to touch (geometry) and move the object (kinematics); at a low level it determines how to realize that plan through contact dynamics. Building on this insight, we propose a hierarchical RL--MPC framework in which a high-level reinforcement learning (RL) policy predicts a contact intention, a novel object-centric interface that specifies (i) an object-surface contact location and (ii) a post-contact object-level subgoal pose. Conditioned on this contact intention, a low-level contact-implicit model predictive control (MPC) optimizes local contact modes and replans with contact dynamics to generate robot actions that robustly drive the object toward each subgoal. We evaluate the framework on non-prehensile tasks, including geometry-generalized pushing and object 3D reorientation. It achieves near-100% success with substantially reduced data (10x less than end-to-end baselines), highly robust performance, and zero-shot sim-to-real transfer.