Tactile sensors are believed to be essential in robotic manipulation, and prior works often rely on experts to reason the sensor feedback and design a controller. With the recent advancement in data-driven approaches, complicated manipulation can be realised, but an accurate and efficient tactile simulation is necessary for policy training. To this end, we present an approach to model a commonly used pressure sensor array in simulation and to train a tactile-based manipulation policy with sim-to-real transfer in mind. Each taxel in our model is represented as a mass-spring-damper system, in which the parameters are iteratively identified as plausible ranges. This allows a policy to be trained with domain randomisation which improves its robustness to different environments. Then, we introduce encoders to further align the critical tactile features in a latent space. Finally, our experiments answer questions on tactile-based manipulation, tactile modelling and sim-to-real performance.
@article{arxiv.2305.09870,
title = {Crossing the Reality Gap in Tactile-Based Learning},
author = {Ya-Yen Tsai and Bidan Huang and Yu Zheng and Lei Han and Wang Wei Lee and Edward Johns},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.09870},
year = {2023}
}