Salvatore Pirozzi

Pietro Falco, Shuang Lu, Ciro Natale et al.

In this work, we introduce the problem of cross-modal visuo-tactile object recognition with robotic active exploration. With this term, we mean that the robot observes a set of objects with visual perception and, later on, it is able to recognize such objects only with tactile exploration, without having touched any object before. Using a machine learning terminology, in our application we have a visual training set and a tactile test set, or vice versa. To tackle this problem, we propose an approach constituted by four steps: finding a visuo-tactile common representation, defining a suitable set of features, transferring the features across the domains, and classifying the objects. We show the results of our approach using a set of 15 objects, collecting 40 visual examples and five tactile examples for each object. The proposed approach achieves an accuracy of 94.7%, which is comparable with the accuracy of the monomodal case, i.e., when using visual data both as training set and test set. Moreover, it performs well compared to the human ability, which we have roughly estimated carrying out an experiment with ten participants.

Marco Costanzo, Simon Stelter, Ciro Natale et al.

Manipulation planning and control are relevant building blocks of a robotic system and their tight integration is a key factor to improve robot autonomy and allows robots to perform manipulation tasks of increasing complexity, such as those needed in the in-store logistics domain. Supermarkets contain a large variety of objects to be placed on the shelf layers with specific constraints, doing this with a robot is a challenge and requires a high dexterity. However, an integration of reactive grasping control and motion planning can allow robots to perform such tasks even with grippers with limited dexterity. The main contribution of the paper is a novel method for planning manipulation tasks to be executed using a reactive control layer that provides more control modalities, i.e., slipping avoidance and controlled sliding. Experiments with a new force/tactile sensor equipping the gripper of a mobile manipulator show that the approach allows the robot to successfully perform manipulation tasks unfeasible with a standard fixed grasp.