Tactile-Driven Gentle Grasping for Human-Robot Collaborative Tasks

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Chris J Ford, Haoran Li, John A Lloyd, Manuel G. Catalano, Matteo Bianchi, Efi Psomopoulou, Nathan F Lepora

Published: 04 Jul 2023, Last Modified: 20 Jan 20262023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: This paper presents a control scheme for force sensitive, gentle grasping with a Pisa/IIT anthropomorphic SoftHand equipped with a miniaturised version of the TacTip optical tactile sensor on all five fingertips. The tactile sensors provide high-resolution information about a grasp and how the fingers interact with held objects. We first describe a series of hardware developments for performing asynchronous sensor data acquisition and processing, resulting in a fast control loop sufficient for real-time grasp control. We then develop a novel grasp controller that uses tactile feedback from all five fingertip sensors simultaneously to gently and stably grasp 43 objects of varying geometry and stiffness, which is then applied to a human-to-robot handover task. These developments open the door to more advanced manipulation with underactuated hands via fast reflexive control using high-resolution tactile sensing.