Multi-Modal Geometric Learning for Grasping and Manipulation
This addresses the challenge of accurate geometric reasoning in robotics, particularly in occluded scenarios, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing multi-modal approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of creating accurate 3D models for robotic manipulation by incorporating depth and tactile information, demonstrating that even small amounts of tactile data improve geometry prediction and outperform other visual-tactile methods.
This work provides an architecture that incorporates depth and tactile information to create rich and accurate 3D models useful for robotic manipulation tasks. This is accomplished through the use of a 3D convolutional neural network (CNN). Offline, the network is provided with both depth and tactile information and trained to predict the object's geometry, thus filling in regions of occlusion. At runtime, the network is provided a partial view of an object. Tactile information is acquired to augment the captured depth information. The network can then reason about the object's geometry by utilizing both the collected tactile and depth information. We demonstrate that even small amounts of additional tactile information can be incredibly helpful in reasoning about object geometry. This is particularly true when information from depth alone fails to produce an accurate geometric prediction. Our method is benchmarked against and outperforms other visual-tactile approaches to general geometric reasoning. We also provide experimental results comparing grasping success with our method.