ViTaSCOPE: Visuo-tactile Implicit Representation for In-hand Pose and Extrinsic Contact Estimation

Jayjun Lee, Nima Fazeli

Keywords: Tactile Sensing, Robot Perception, Extrinsic Dexterity

TL;DR: (Accepted to RSS 2025) ViTaSCOPE is a neural implicit representation that integrates vision and touch for in-hand object pose and extrinsic contact estimation, demonstrating zero-shot sim-to-real transfer.

Abstract: Mastering dexterous, contact-rich object manipulation demands precise estimation of both in-hand object poses and external contact locations—tasks particularly challenging due to partial and noisy observations. We present ViTaSCOPE: Visuo-Tactile Simultaneous Contact and Object Pose Estimation, an object-centric neural implicit representation that fuses vision and high-resolution tactile feedback. By representing objects as signed distance fields and distributed tactile feedback as neural shear fields, ViTaSCOPE accurately localizes objects and registers extrinsic contacts onto their 3D geometry as contact fields. Our method enables seamless reasoning over complementary visuo-tactile cues by leveraging simulation for scalable training and zero-shot transfers to the real-world by bridging the sim-to-real gap. We evaluate our method through comprehensive simulated and real-world experiments, demonstrating its capabilities in dexterous manipulation scenarios.

Submission Number: 19