English

Dexterous Robotic Piano Playing at Scale

Robotics 2025-11-05 v1

Abstract

Endowing robot hands with human-level dexterity has been a long-standing goal in robotics. Bimanual robotic piano playing represents a particularly challenging task: it is high-dimensional, contact-rich, and requires fast, precise control. We present OmniPianist, the first agent capable of performing nearly one thousand music pieces via scalable, human-demonstration-free learning. Our approach is built on three core components. First, we introduce an automatic fingering strategy based on Optimal Transport (OT), allowing the agent to autonomously discover efficient piano-playing strategies from scratch without demonstrations. Second, we conduct large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) by training more than 2,000 agents, each specialized in distinct music pieces, and aggregate their experience into a dataset named RP1M++, consisting of over one million trajectories for robotic piano playing. Finally, we employ a Flow Matching Transformer to leverage RP1M++ through large-scale imitation learning, resulting in the OmniPianist agent capable of performing a wide range of musical pieces. Extensive experiments and ablation studies highlight the effectiveness and scalability of our approach, advancing dexterous robotic piano playing at scale.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.02504,
  title  = {Dexterous Robotic Piano Playing at Scale},
  author = {Le Chen and Yi Zhao and Jan Schneider and Quankai Gao and Simon Guist and Cheng Qian and Juho Kannala and Bernhard Schölkopf and Joni Pajarinen and Dieter Büchler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.02504},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:21:04.542Z