In-Hand Manipulation of Unknown Objects with Tactile Sensing for Insertion

Marion Lepert, Chaoyi Pan, Shenli Yuan, Rika Antonova, Jeannette Bohg

Keywords: In-hand manipulation, tactile sensing

TL;DR: This paper presents a method to manipulate unknown objects in-hand using tactile sensing and the novel Tactile-Enabled Roller Grasper.

Abstract: We present a method to manipulate unknown objects in-hand using tactile sensing without relying on a known object model. In many cases, vision-only approaches may not be feasible; for example, due to occlusion in cluttered spaces. We address this limitation by introducing a method to reorient unknown objects using tactile sensing. It incrementally builds a probabilistic estimate of the object shape and pose during task-driven manipulation. Our approach uses Bayesian optimization to balance exploration of the global object shape with efficient task completion. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we apply it to a simulated Tactile-Enabled Roller Grasper, a gripper that rolls objects in hand while collecting tactile data. We evaluate our method on an insertion task with randomly generated objects and find that it reliably reorients objects while significantly reducing the exploration time.

Confirmation: I am a student and I would like to be considered for the funding award.