Incorporating effective tactile sensing and mechanical compliance is key towards enabling robust and safe operation of robots in unknown, uncertain and cluttered environments. Towards realizing this goal, we present a lightweight, easy-to-build, highly compliant dense geometry sensor and end effector that comprises an inflated latex membrane with a depth sensor behind it. We present the motivations and the hardware design for this Soft-bubble and demonstrate its capabilities through example tasks including tactile-object classification, pose estimation and tracking, and nonprehensile object manipulation. We also present initial experiments to show the importance of high-resolution geometry sensing for tactile tasks and discuss applications in robust manipulation.
@article{arxiv.1904.02252,
title = {Soft-bubble: A highly compliant dense geometry tactile sensor for robot manipulation},
author = {Alex Alspach and Kunimatsu Hashimoto and Naveen Kuppuswamy and Russ Tedrake},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.02252},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
Research done at Toyota Research Institute. Presented at RoboSoft, April 2019