Related papers: AcTExplore: Active Tactile Exploration of Unknown …
Haptic exploration is a key skill for both robots and humans to discriminate and handle unknown objects or to recognize familiar objects. Its active nature is evident in humans who from early on reliably acquire sophisticated sensory-motor…
Tactile perception is important for robotic systems that interact with the world through touch. Touch is an active sense in which tactile measurements depend on the contact properties of an interaction--e.g., velocity, force,…
Humans rely on their visual and tactile senses to develop a comprehensive 3D understanding of their physical environment. Recently, there has been a growing interest in exploring and manipulating objects using data-driven approaches that…
We present a novel approach to interactive 3D object perception for robots. Unlike previous perception algorithms that rely on known object models or a large amount of annotated training data, we propose a poking-based approach that…
We introduce an active 3D reconstruction method which integrates visual perception, robot-object interaction, and 3D scanning to recover both the exterior and interior, i.e., unexposed, geometries of a target 3D object. Unlike other works…
This paper addresses the problem of simultaneously exploring an unknown object to model its shape, using tactile sensors on robotic fingers, while also improving finger placement to optimise grasp stability. In many situations, a robot will…
This article introduces XPLORER, a passive deformable UAV with a spring-augmented chassis and proprioceptive state awareness, designed to endure collisions and maintain smooth contact. We develop a fast-converging external force estimation…
For robot manipulation, a complete and accurate object shape is desirable. Here, we present a method that combines visual and haptic reconstruction in a closed-loop pipeline. From an initial viewpoint, the object shape is reconstructed…
Object pose estimation methods allow finding locations of objects in unstructured environments. This is a highly desired skill for autonomous robot manipulation as robots need to estimate the precise poses of the objects in order to…
Interactive exploration of the unknown physical properties of objects such as stiffness, mass, center of mass, friction coefficient, and shape is crucial for autonomous robotic systems operating continuously in unstructured environments.…
This work studies the problem of shape reconstruction and object localization using a vision-based tactile sensor, GelSlim. The main contributions are the recovery of local shapes from contact, an approach to reconstruct the tactile shape…
We study the problem of rapidly identifying contact dynamics of unknown objects in partially known environments. The key innovation of our method is a novel formulation of the contact dynamics estimation problem as the joint estimation of…
Reconstructing compositional 3D representations of scenes, where each object is represented with its own 3D model, is a highly desirable capability in robotics and augmented reality. However, most existing methods rely heavily on strong…
Object shape provides important information for robotic manipulation; for instance, selecting an effective grasp depends on both the global and local shape of the object of interest, while reaching into clutter requires accurate surface…
Deep Reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable success in domains with well-defined reward structures, such as Atari games and locomotion. In contrast, dexterous manipulation lacks general-purpose reward formulations and…
As humans can explore and understand the world through active touch, similar capability is desired for robots. In this paper, we address the problem of active tactile object recognition, pose estimation and shape transfer learning, where a…
Increasing the performance of tactile sensing in robots enables versatile, in-hand manipulation. Vision-based tactile sensors have been widely used as rich tactile feedback has been shown to be correlated with increased performance in…
We present an active visual search model for finding objects in unknown environments. The proposed algorithm guides the robot towards the sought object using the relevant stimuli provided by the visual sensors. Existing search strategies…
Knowledge of 3-D object shape is of great importance to robot manipulation tasks, but may not be readily available in unstructured environments. While vision is often occluded during robot-object interaction, high-resolution tactile sensors…
The development of vision-based tactile sensors has significantly enhanced robots' perception and manipulation capabilities, especially for tasks requiring contact-rich interactions with objects. In this work, we present DTactive, a novel…