EgoCPT: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from a Single Ego-Centric Video with Contact-Aware Optimization

While expert demonstrations on real robots are difficult to collect, human ego-centric videos are easy to collect and abundant on the internet. However, learning dexterous manipulation policies from human videos remains challenging---one of the most important challenges being the difficulty of reconstructing physically grounded robot trajectories due to the large embodiment gap. In this paper, we propose EgoCPT, a novel paradigm for learning high-quality retargeted dexterous hand trajectories directly from an ego-centric video, which can then be deployed directly on real robots. The only inputs to our method are an ego-centric RGB video and a reference hand pose trajectory, which can be easily obtained through off-the-shelf software or specialized cameras during recording. Our method is particularly robust to noisy hand poses attributed to our novel contact-aware optimization framework, which iteratively optimizes the contact points between the robot hands and objects. Across five manipulation tasks, our method achieves overall success rates of 67.3% on noisy EgoDex hand-pose reconstructions and 92.0% on high-quality TACO reconstructions collected using motion-capture hardware, outperforming multiple baselines on both benchmarks.