Jethro's Braindump

RSS 2020 Workshops: Visuotactile Sensors for Robust Manipulation - From Perception to Control

Meta

Venue
RSS
Year
2020

Soft Manipulation

Soft grippers enhance the robustness of gripping, particularly for complex object geometries

  • Compliance is a double-edged sword
  • We may need to sense what actually happened from “our” side of the compliance
  • We cannot assume post-grasp pose of objects
  • We may need to maintain a specific grasp pose or force
  • We may need to control through contact

Dense Geometry Tactile Sensors (DGT)

Benefits compared to RGB-D sensors:

  1. Agnostic to lighting conditions
  2. Agnostic to self-occlusion during manipulation
  3. Agnostic to hard-to-see objects

Drawbacks:

  1. Modelling difficulties

Modelling the Soft Membrane Dynamics

  • Use quasi-static approximation to model deformation in membrane
  • Knowing the deformation, it is possible to infer which part of the model causes the deformation (inverse model)

Tactile Image Sensors applicable to manipulation and inspection tasks