Abhinav Grover

Abhinav Grover, Philippe Nadeau, Christopher Grebe et al.

The ability to perceive object slip via tactile feedback enables humans to accomplish complex manipulation tasks including maintaining a stable grasp. Despite the utility of tactile information for many applications, tactile sensors have yet to be widely deployed in industrial robotics settings; part of the challenge lies in identifying slip and other events from the tactile data stream. In this paper, we present a learning-based method to detect slip using barometric tactile sensors. These sensors have many desirable properties including high durability and reliability, and are built from inexpensive, off-the-shelf components. We train a temporal convolution neural network to detect slip, achieving high detection accuracies while displaying robustness to the speed and direction of the slip motion. Further, we test our detector on two manipulation tasks involving a variety of common objects and demonstrate successful generalization to real-world scenarios not seen during training. We argue that barometric tactile sensing technology, combined with data-driven learning, is suitable for many manipulation tasks such as slip compensation.

Abhinav Grover, Christopher Grebe, Philippe Nadeau et al.

Despite the utility of tactile information, tactile sensors have yet to be widely deployed in industrial robotics settings. Part of the challenge lies in identifying slip and other key events from the tactile data stream. In this paper, we present a learning-based method to detect slip using barometric tactile sensors. Although these sensors have a low resolution, they have many other desirable properties including high reliability and durability, a very slim profile, and a low cost. We are able to achieve slip detection accuracies of greater than 91% while being robust to the speed and direction of the slip motion. Further, we test our detector on two robot manipulation tasks involving common household objects and demonstrate successful generalization to real-world scenarios not seen during training. We show that barometric tactile sensing technology, combined with data-driven learning, is potentially suitable for complex manipulation tasks such as slip compensation.

Emmett Wise, Matthew Giamou, Soroush Khoubyarian et al.

Correct fusion of data from two sensors is not possible without an accurate estimate of their relative pose, which can be determined through the process of extrinsic calibration. When two or more sensors are capable of producing their own egomotion estimates (i.e., measurements of their trajectories through an environment), the 'hand-eye' formulation of extrinsic calibration can be employed. In this paper, we extend our recent work on a convex optimization approach for hand-eye calibration to the case where one of the sensors cannot observe the scale of its translational motion (e.g., a monocular camera observing an unmapped environment). We prove that our technique is able to provide a certifiably globally optimal solution to both the known- and unknown-scale variants of hand-eye calibration, provided that the measurement noise is bounded. Herein, we focus on the theoretical aspects of the problem, show the tightness and stability of our solution, and demonstrate the optimality and speed of our algorithm through experiments with synthetic data.