Performing in-hand, contact-rich, and long-horizon dexterous manipulation remains an unsolved challenge in robotics. Prior hand dexterity works have considered each of these three challenges in isolation, yet do not combine these skills into a single, complex task. To further test the capabilities of dexterity, we propose drumming as a testbed for dexterous manipulation. Drumming naturally integrates all three challenges: it involves in-hand control for stabilizing and adjusting the drumstick with the fingers, contact-rich interaction through repeated striking of the drum surface, and long-horizon coordination when switching between drums and sustaining rhythmic play. We present DexDrummer, a hierarchical object-centric bimanual drumming policy trained in simulation with sim-to-real transfer. The framework reduces the exploration difficulty of pure reinforcement learning by combining trajectory planning with residual RL corrections for fast transitions between drums. A dexterous manipulation policy handles contact-rich dynamics, guided by rewards that explicitly model both finger-stick and stick-drum interactions. In simulation, we show our policy can play two styles of music: multi-drum, bimanual songs and challenging, technical exercises that require increased dexterity. Across simulated bimanual tasks, our dexterous, reactive policy outperforms a fixed grasp policy by 1.87x across easy songs and 1.22x across hard songs F1 scores. In real-world tasks, we show song performance across a multi-drum setup. DexDrummer is able to play our training song and its extended version with an F1 score of 1.0.

翻译：实现手内、高接触且长时域的灵巧操作仍是机器人领域尚未解决的挑战。先前的灵巧手研究分别探讨了这三方面难题，但未将这些技能整合为单一复杂任务。为进一步测试灵巧操控能力，我们提出以击鼓作为灵巧操作的试验平台。击鼓自然融合了所有三个挑战：通过手指稳定和调节鼓棒的手内控制、反复敲击鼓面的高接触交互，以及在切换鼓具和维持节奏演奏时的长时域协调。我们提出DexDrummer——一种在仿真中训练并通过仿真到现实迁移的分层式物体为中心的双臂击鼓策略。该框架通过结合轨迹规划与用于鼓间快速切换的残差强化学习修正，降低了纯强化学习的探索难度。灵巧操作策略处理高接触动力学，其奖励函数显式建模手指-鼓棒和鼓棒-鼓面双重交互。在仿真中，我们展示该策略可演奏两种音乐风格：多鼓双臂曲目以及需要更高灵巧度的挑战性技巧练习曲。在模拟双臂任务中，对于简单曲目，我们的灵巧反应式策略在F1分数上比固定抓取策略高1.87倍；对于困难曲目则高1.22倍。在真实世界任务中，我们验证了多鼓设置下的乐曲演奏表现。DexDrummer能够以1.0的F1分数演奏训练曲目及其扩展版本。