11 accepted papers
While most optical tactile sensors rely on measuring surface displacement, insights from continuum mechanics suggest that measuring shear strain provides key information for tactile sensing. In this work, we introduce an optical tactile sensing principle based on shear strain detection. A silicone r
Abstract—This paper addresses the multi-faceted problem of robot grasping, where multiple criteria may conflict and differ in importance. We introduce a probabilistic framework, Grasp Ranking and Criteria Evaluation (GRaCE), which employs hierarchical rule-based logic and a rank-preserving utility f…
In this work, we present GraspFlow, a refinement approach for generating context-specific grasps. We formulate the problem of grasp synthesis as a sampling problem: we seek to sample from a context-conditioned probability distribution of successful grasps. However, this target distribution is unknow…
Humans display the remarkable ability to sense the world through tools and other held objects. For example, we are able to pinpoint impact locations on a held rod and tell apart different textures using a rigid probe. In this work, we consider how we can enable robots to have a similar capacity, i.e…
This work contributes an event-driven visual-tactile perception system, comprising a novel biologically-inspired tactile sensor and multi-modal spike-based learning. Our neuromorphic fingertip tactile sensor, NeuTouch, scales well with the number of taxels thanks to its event-based nature. Likewise,…
Touch is arguably the most important sensing modality in physical interactions. However, tactile sensing has been largely under-explored in robotics applications owing to the complexity in making perceptual inferences until the recent advancements in machine learning or deep learning in particular.…
The sense of touch is an essential sensing modality for a robot to interact with the environment as it provides rich and multimodal sensory information upon contact. It enriches the perceptual understanding of the environment and closes the loop for action generation. One fundamental area of percept…
Tactile perception is crucial for a variety of robot tasks including grasping and in-hand manipulation. New advances in flexible, event-driven, electronic skins may soon endow robots with touch perception capabilities similar to humans. These electronic skins respond asynchronously to changes (e.g.,…
This letter proposes a model predictive control approach for semi-autonomous teleoperation of robot manipulators: the focus is on avoiding obstacles with the whole robot frame, while exploiting predictions of the operator's motion. The hand pose of the human operator provides the reference for the e
This paper proposes a model predictive control (MPC) approach for semi-autonomous teleoperation of robot manipulators: the focus is on automatically avoiding singular configurations of the robot and obstacles in the robot workspace with the whole robot frame, exploiting predictions of the operators…
The sense of touch is arguably the first human sense to develop. Empowering robots with the sense of touch may augment their understanding of interacted objects and the environment beyond standard sensory modalities (e.g., vision). This paper investigates the effect of hybridizing touch and sliding…