190 research outputs found
Haptic Exploration of Unknown Objects for Robust in-hand Manipulation.
Human-like robot hands provide the flexibility to manipulate a variety of objects that are found in unstructured environments. Knowledge of object properties and motion trajectory is required, but often not available in real-world manipulation tasks. Although it is possible to grasp and manipulate unknown objects, an uninformed grasp leads to inferior stability, accuracy, and repeatability of the manipulation. Therefore, a central challenge of in-hand manipulation in unstructured environments is to acquire this information safely and efficiently. We propose an in-hand manipulation framework that does not assume any prior information about the object and the motion, but instead extracts the object properties through a novel haptic exploration procedure and learns the motion from demonstration using dynamical movement primitives. We evaluate our approach by unknown object manipulation experiments using a human-like robot hand. The results show that haptic exploration improves the manipulation robustness and accuracy significantly, compared to the virtual spring framework baseline method that is widely used for grasping unknown objects
TactileGCN: A Graph Convolutional Network for Predicting Grasp Stability with Tactile Sensors
Tactile sensors provide useful contact data during the interaction with an
object which can be used to accurately learn to determine the stability of a
grasp. Most of the works in the literature represented tactile readings as
plain feature vectors or matrix-like tactile images, using them to train
machine learning models. In this work, we explore an alternative way of
exploiting tactile information to predict grasp stability by leveraging
graph-like representations of tactile data, which preserve the actual spatial
arrangement of the sensor's taxels and their locality. In experimentation, we
trained a Graph Neural Network to binary classify grasps as stable or slippery
ones. To train such network and prove its predictive capabilities for the
problem at hand, we captured a novel dataset of approximately 5000
three-fingered grasps across 41 objects for training and 1000 grasps with 10
unknown objects for testing. Our experiments prove that this novel approach can
be effectively used to predict grasp stability
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