Leveraging Touch Sensors to Improve Mobile Manipulation
This work addresses the problem of secure and successful manipulation for service robots, but it appears incremental as it focuses on developing new hardware without presenting concrete results or numbers.
The paper tackles the challenge of reliable object manipulation on mobile service robots by developing novel tactile-equipped end-effectors for the TIAGo robot, aiming to improve grasping performance and enable further research in areas like learning from human demonstration.
Despite many advances in service robotics, successful and secure object manipulation on mobile platforms is still a challenge. In order to come closer to human grasping performance, it is natural to provide robots with the same capability that humans have: the sense of touch. This abstract presents novel, tactile-equipped end-effectors for the service robot TIAGo that are currently being developed. Their primary goal is to improve reliability and success of mobile manipulation, but they also enable further research in related fields such as learning by human demonstration, object exploration and force control algorithms.