Learning Precise, Contact-Rich Manipulation through Uncalibrated Tactile Skins

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pattabiraman, Venkatesh, Cao, Yifeng, Haldar, Siddhant, Pinto, Lerrel, Bhirangi, Raunaq
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Pattabiraman, Venkatesh
Cao, Yifeng
Haldar, Siddhant
Pinto, Lerrel
Bhirangi, Raunaq
author_facet Pattabiraman, Venkatesh
Cao, Yifeng
Haldar, Siddhant
Pinto, Lerrel
Bhirangi, Raunaq
contents While visuomotor policy learning has advanced robotic manipulation, precisely executing contact-rich tasks remains challenging due to the limitations of vision in reasoning about physical interactions. To address this, recent work has sought to integrate tactile sensing into policy learning. However, many existing approaches rely on optical tactile sensors that are either restricted to recognition tasks or require complex dimensionality reduction steps for policy learning. In this work, we explore learning policies with magnetic skin sensors, which are inherently low-dimensional, highly sensitive, and inexpensive to integrate with robotic platforms. To leverage these sensors effectively, we present the Visuo-Skin (ViSk) framework, a simple approach that uses a transformer-based policy and treats skin sensor data as additional tokens alongside visual information. Evaluated on four complex real-world tasks involving credit card swiping, plug insertion, USB insertion, and bookshelf retrieval, ViSk significantly outperforms both vision-only and optical tactile sensing based policies. Further analysis reveals that combining tactile and visual modalities enhances policy performance and spatial generalization, achieving an average improvement of 27.5% across tasks. https://visuoskin.github.io/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_17246
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Precise, Contact-Rich Manipulation through Uncalibrated Tactile Skins
Pattabiraman, Venkatesh
Cao, Yifeng
Haldar, Siddhant
Pinto, Lerrel
Bhirangi, Raunaq
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
While visuomotor policy learning has advanced robotic manipulation, precisely executing contact-rich tasks remains challenging due to the limitations of vision in reasoning about physical interactions. To address this, recent work has sought to integrate tactile sensing into policy learning. However, many existing approaches rely on optical tactile sensors that are either restricted to recognition tasks or require complex dimensionality reduction steps for policy learning. In this work, we explore learning policies with magnetic skin sensors, which are inherently low-dimensional, highly sensitive, and inexpensive to integrate with robotic platforms. To leverage these sensors effectively, we present the Visuo-Skin (ViSk) framework, a simple approach that uses a transformer-based policy and treats skin sensor data as additional tokens alongside visual information. Evaluated on four complex real-world tasks involving credit card swiping, plug insertion, USB insertion, and bookshelf retrieval, ViSk significantly outperforms both vision-only and optical tactile sensing based policies. Further analysis reveals that combining tactile and visual modalities enhances policy performance and spatial generalization, achieving an average improvement of 27.5% across tasks. https://visuoskin.github.io/
title Learning Precise, Contact-Rich Manipulation through Uncalibrated Tactile Skins
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.17246