Visual-auditory Extrinsic Contact Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yi, Xili, Lee, Jayjun, Fazeli, Nima
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Yi, Xili
Lee, Jayjun
Fazeli, Nima
author_facet Yi, Xili
Lee, Jayjun
Fazeli, Nima
contents Robust manipulation often hinges on a robot's ability to perceive extrinsic contacts-contacts between a grasped object and its surrounding environment. However, these contacts are difficult to observe through vision alone due to occlusions, limited resolution, and ambiguous near-contact states. In this paper, we propose a visual-auditory method for extrinsic contact estimation that integrates global scene information from vision with local contact cues obtained through active audio sensing. Our approach equips a robotic gripper with contact microphones and conduction speakers, enabling the system to emit and receive acoustic signals through the grasped object to detect external contacts. We train our perception pipeline entirely in simulation and zero-shot transfer to the real world. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we introduce a real-to-sim audio hallucination technique, injecting real-world audio samples into simulated scenes with ground-truth contact labels. The resulting multimodal model accurately estimates both the location and size of extrinsic contacts across a range of cluttered and occluded scenarios. We further demonstrate that explicit contact prediction significantly improves policy learning for downstream contact-rich manipulation tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_14608
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Visual-auditory Extrinsic Contact Estimation
Yi, Xili
Lee, Jayjun
Fazeli, Nima
Robotics
Robust manipulation often hinges on a robot's ability to perceive extrinsic contacts-contacts between a grasped object and its surrounding environment. However, these contacts are difficult to observe through vision alone due to occlusions, limited resolution, and ambiguous near-contact states. In this paper, we propose a visual-auditory method for extrinsic contact estimation that integrates global scene information from vision with local contact cues obtained through active audio sensing. Our approach equips a robotic gripper with contact microphones and conduction speakers, enabling the system to emit and receive acoustic signals through the grasped object to detect external contacts. We train our perception pipeline entirely in simulation and zero-shot transfer to the real world. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we introduce a real-to-sim audio hallucination technique, injecting real-world audio samples into simulated scenes with ground-truth contact labels. The resulting multimodal model accurately estimates both the location and size of extrinsic contacts across a range of cluttered and occluded scenarios. We further demonstrate that explicit contact prediction significantly improves policy learning for downstream contact-rich manipulation tasks.
title Visual-auditory Extrinsic Contact Estimation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14608