SimShear: Sim-to-Real Shear-based Tactile Servoing

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Freud, Kipp McAdam, Lin, Yijiong, Lepora, Nathan F.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Freud, Kipp McAdam
Lin, Yijiong
Lepora, Nathan F.
author_facet Freud, Kipp McAdam
Lin, Yijiong
Lepora, Nathan F.
contents We present SimShear, a sim-to-real pipeline for tactile control that enables the use of shear information without explicitly modeling shear dynamics in simulation. Shear, arising from lateral movements across contact surfaces, is critical for tasks involving dynamic object interactions but remains challenging to simulate. To address this, we introduce shPix2pix, a shear-conditioned U-Net GAN that transforms simulated tactile images absent of shear, together with a vector encoding shear information, into realistic equivalents with shear deformations. This method outperforms baseline pix2pix approaches in simulating tactile images and in pose/shear prediction. We apply SimShear to two control tasks using a pair of low-cost desktop robotic arms equipped with a vision-based tactile sensor: (i) a tactile tracking task, where a follower arm tracks a surface moved by a leader arm, and (ii) a collaborative co-lifting task, where both arms jointly hold an object while the leader follows a prescribed trajectory. Our method maintains contact errors within 1 to 2 mm across varied trajectories where shear sensing is essential, validating the feasibility of sim-to-real shear modeling with rigid-body simulators and opening new directions for simulation in tactile robotics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_20561
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SimShear: Sim-to-Real Shear-based Tactile Servoing
Freud, Kipp McAdam
Lin, Yijiong
Lepora, Nathan F.
Robotics
We present SimShear, a sim-to-real pipeline for tactile control that enables the use of shear information without explicitly modeling shear dynamics in simulation. Shear, arising from lateral movements across contact surfaces, is critical for tasks involving dynamic object interactions but remains challenging to simulate. To address this, we introduce shPix2pix, a shear-conditioned U-Net GAN that transforms simulated tactile images absent of shear, together with a vector encoding shear information, into realistic equivalents with shear deformations. This method outperforms baseline pix2pix approaches in simulating tactile images and in pose/shear prediction. We apply SimShear to two control tasks using a pair of low-cost desktop robotic arms equipped with a vision-based tactile sensor: (i) a tactile tracking task, where a follower arm tracks a surface moved by a leader arm, and (ii) a collaborative co-lifting task, where both arms jointly hold an object while the leader follows a prescribed trajectory. Our method maintains contact errors within 1 to 2 mm across varied trajectories where shear sensing is essential, validating the feasibility of sim-to-real shear modeling with rigid-body simulators and opening new directions for simulation in tactile robotics.
title SimShear: Sim-to-Real Shear-based Tactile Servoing
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20561