Built Different: Tactile Perception to Overcome Cross-Embodiment Capability Differences in Collaborative Manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bogert, William van den, Iyengar, Madhavan, Fazeli, Nima
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Bogert, William van den
Iyengar, Madhavan
Fazeli, Nima
author_facet Bogert, William van den
Iyengar, Madhavan
Fazeli, Nima
contents Tactile sensing is a widely-studied means of implicit communication between robot and human. In this paper, we investigate how tactile sensing can help bridge differences between robotic embodiments in the context of collaborative manipulation. For a robot, learning and executing force-rich collaboration require compliance to human interaction. While compliance is often achieved with admittance control, many commercial robots lack the joint torque monitoring needed for such control. To address this challenge, we present an approach that uses tactile sensors and behavior cloning to transfer policies from robots with these capabilities to those without. We train a single policy that demonstrates positive transfer across embodiments, including robots without torque sensing. We demonstrate this positive transfer on four different tactile-enabled embodiments using the same policy trained on force-controlled robot data. Across multiple proposed metrics, the best performance came from a decomposed tactile shear-field representation combined with a pre-trained encoder, which improved success rates over alternative representations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_14896
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Built Different: Tactile Perception to Overcome Cross-Embodiment Capability Differences in Collaborative Manipulation
Bogert, William van den
Iyengar, Madhavan
Fazeli, Nima
Robotics
Machine Learning
Tactile sensing is a widely-studied means of implicit communication between robot and human. In this paper, we investigate how tactile sensing can help bridge differences between robotic embodiments in the context of collaborative manipulation. For a robot, learning and executing force-rich collaboration require compliance to human interaction. While compliance is often achieved with admittance control, many commercial robots lack the joint torque monitoring needed for such control. To address this challenge, we present an approach that uses tactile sensors and behavior cloning to transfer policies from robots with these capabilities to those without. We train a single policy that demonstrates positive transfer across embodiments, including robots without torque sensing. We demonstrate this positive transfer on four different tactile-enabled embodiments using the same policy trained on force-controlled robot data. Across multiple proposed metrics, the best performance came from a decomposed tactile shear-field representation combined with a pre-trained encoder, which improved success rates over alternative representations.
title Built Different: Tactile Perception to Overcome Cross-Embodiment Capability Differences in Collaborative Manipulation
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14896