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Main Authors: Gordon, Ethan K., Baraki, Bruke, Bui, Hien, Posa, Michael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13595
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author Gordon, Ethan K.
Baraki, Bruke
Bui, Hien
Posa, Michael
author_facet Gordon, Ethan K.
Baraki, Bruke
Bui, Hien
Posa, Michael
contents General robot manipulation requires the handling of previously unseen objects. Learning a physically accurate model at test time can provide significant benefits in data efficiency, predictability, and reuse between tasks. Tactile sensing can compliment vision with its robustness to occlusion, but its temporal sparsity necessitates careful online exploration to maintain data efficiency. Direct contact can also cause an unrestrained object to move, requiring both shape and location estimation. In this work, we propose a learning and exploration framework that uses only tactile data to simultaneously determine the shape and location of rigid objects with minimal robot motion. We build on recent advances in contact-rich system identification to formulate a loss function that penalizes physical constraint violation without introducing the numerical stiffness inherent in rigid-body contact. Optimizing this loss, we can learn cuboid and convex polyhedral geometries with less than 10s of randomly collected data after first contact. Our exploration scheme seeks to maximize Expected Information Gain and results in significantly faster learning in both simulated and real-robot experiments. More information can be found at https://dairlab.github.io/activetactile
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_13595
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Active Tactile Exploration for Rigid Body Pose and Shape Estimation
Gordon, Ethan K.
Baraki, Bruke
Bui, Hien
Posa, Michael
Robotics
General robot manipulation requires the handling of previously unseen objects. Learning a physically accurate model at test time can provide significant benefits in data efficiency, predictability, and reuse between tasks. Tactile sensing can compliment vision with its robustness to occlusion, but its temporal sparsity necessitates careful online exploration to maintain data efficiency. Direct contact can also cause an unrestrained object to move, requiring both shape and location estimation. In this work, we propose a learning and exploration framework that uses only tactile data to simultaneously determine the shape and location of rigid objects with minimal robot motion. We build on recent advances in contact-rich system identification to formulate a loss function that penalizes physical constraint violation without introducing the numerical stiffness inherent in rigid-body contact. Optimizing this loss, we can learn cuboid and convex polyhedral geometries with less than 10s of randomly collected data after first contact. Our exploration scheme seeks to maximize Expected Information Gain and results in significantly faster learning in both simulated and real-robot experiments. More information can be found at https://dairlab.github.io/activetactile
title Active Tactile Exploration for Rigid Body Pose and Shape Estimation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13595