Tactile Estimation of Extrinsic Contact Patch for Stable Placement
This addresses the challenge of fine-grained manipulation for robots in tasks like stacking objects, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing tactile perception methods.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling robots to stack complex-shaped objects by inferring placement stability from tactile readings during contact formation, demonstrating that it is possible to estimate stability based on force and tactile observations.
Precise perception of contact interactions is essential for fine-grained manipulation skills for robots. In this paper, we present the design of feedback skills for robots that must learn to stack complex-shaped objects on top of each other (see Fig.1). To design such a system, a robot should be able to reason about the stability of placement from very gentle contact interactions. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to infer the stability of object placement based on tactile readings during contact formation between the object and its environment. In particular, we estimate the contact patch between a grasped object and its environment using force and tactile observations to estimate the stability of the object during a contact formation. The contact patch could be used to estimate the stability of the object upon release of the grasp. The proposed method is demonstrated in various pairs of objects that are used in a very popular board game.