Related papers: AcTExplore: Active Tactile Exploration of Unknown …
Object surface reconstruction brings essential benefits to robot grasping, object recognition, and object manipulation. When measuring the surface distribution of an unknown object by tapping, the greatest challenge is to select tapping…
General robot manipulation requires the handling of previously unseen objects. Learning a physically accurate model at test time can provide significant benefits in data efficiency, predictability, and reuse between tasks. Tactile sensing…
The perception of an object's surface is important for robotic applications enabling robust object manipulation. The level of accuracy in such a representation affects the outcome of the action planning, especially during tasks that require…
Efficient and accurate 3D object shape reconstruction contributes significantly to the success of a robot's physical interaction with its environment. Acquiring accurate shape information about unknown objects is challenging, especially in…
Accurate shape reconstruction of transparent objects is a challenging task due to their non-Lambertian surfaces and yet necessary for robots for accurate pose perception and safe manipulation. As vision-based sensing can produce erroneous…
Humans build 3D understandings of the world through active object exploration, using jointly their senses of vision and touch. However, in 3D shape reconstruction, most recent progress has relied on static datasets of limited sensory data…
The missing signal caused by the objects being occluded or an unstable sensor is a common challenge during data collection. Such missing signals will adversely affect the results obtained from the data, and this issue is observed more…
Robust object pose estimation is essential for manipulation and interaction tasks in robotics, particularly in scenarios where visual data is limited or sensitive to lighting, occlusions, and appearances. Tactile sensors often offer limited…
Tactile recognition of 3D objects remains a challenging task. Compared to 2D shapes, the complex geometry of 3D surfaces requires richer tactile signals, more dexterous actions, and more advanced encoding techniques. In this work, we…
In this paper, 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…
Robots operating in an open world will encounter novel objects with unknown physical properties, such as mass, friction, or size. These robots will need to sense these properties through interaction prior to performing downstream tasks with…
Inspired by humans' ability to perceive the surface texture of unfamiliar objects without relying on vision, the sense of touch can play a crucial role in robots exploring the environment, particularly in scenes where vision is difficult to…
Inspired by the human ability to perform complex manipulation in the complete absence of vision (like retrieving an object from a pocket), the robotic manipulation field is motivated to develop new methods for tactile-based object…
This paper explores active sensing strategies that employ vision-based tactile sensors for robotic perception and classification of fabric textures. We formalize the active sampling problem in the context of tactile fabric recognition and…
Intricate behaviors an organism can exhibit is predicated on its ability to sense and effectively interpret complexities of its surroundings. Relevant information is often distributed between multiple modalities, and requires the organism…
Can a robot grasp an unknown object without seeing it? In this paper, we present a tactile-sensing based approach to this challenging problem of grasping novel objects without prior knowledge of their location or physical properties. Our…
We introduce GEOTACT, the first robotic system capable of grasping and retrieving objects of potentially unknown shapes buried in a granular environment. While important in many applications, ranging from mining and exploration to search…
Non-flat surfaces pose difficulties for robots operating in unstructured environments. Reconstructions of uneven surfaces may only be partially possible due to non-compliant end-effectors and limitations on vision systems such as…
In this paper, we present a methodology that uses an optical tactile sensor for efficient tactile exploration of embedded objects within soft materials. The methodology consists of an exploration phase, where a probabilistic estimate of the…
Robotic exploration under uncertain environments is challenging when optical information is not available. In this paper, we propose an autonomous solution of exploring an unknown task space based on tactile sensing alone. We first designed…