Neural Contact Fields: Tracking Extrinsic Contact with Tactile Sensing

Carolina Higuera, Siyuan Dong, Byron Boots, Mustafa Mukadam

Keywords: Neural Fields, Tactile Sensing, Extrinsic Contact

TL;DR: Neural Contact Fields, a method that brings together neural fields and tactile sensing to address the problem of tracking extrinsic contact between object and environment.

Abstract: We present Neural Contact Fields, a method that brings together neural fields and tactile sensing to address the problem of tracking extrinsic contact between object and environment. Knowing where the external contact occurs is a first step towards its control to facilitate downstream manipulation tasks. Prior work typically assume a contact type (e.g. point or line), does not capture contact/no-contact transitions, and only works with basic geometric-shaped objects. Neural Contact Fields are the first method that can track arbitrary multi-modal extrinsic contacts without making any assumptions about the contact type. Our key insight is to estimate the probability of contact for any 3D point in the latent space of object’s shapes, given vision-based tactile inputs that sense the local motion resulting from the external contact. In experiments, we find that Neural Contact Fields are able to localize multiple contact patches without making any assumptions about the geometry of the contact, and capture contact/no-contact transitions for known categories of objects with unseen shapes in unseen environment configurations.

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2210.09297/code)