VibeCheck: Using Active Acoustic Tactile Sensing for Contact-Rich Manipulation
This work provides a novel sensing modality for contact-rich manipulation tasks, offering a low-cost alternative to traditional tactile sensors.
The authors developed an active acoustic tactile sensing gripper that uses piezoelectric fingers to classify objects, estimate grasping positions, and detect contact types, achieving robust peg insertion on a UR5 robot using only acoustic feedback.
The acoustic response of an object can reveal a lot about its global state, for example its material properties or the extrinsic contacts it is making with the world. In this work, we build an active acoustic sensing gripper equipped with two piezoelectric fingers: one for generating signals, the other for receiving them. By sending an acoustic vibration from one finger to the other through an object, we gain insight into an object's acoustic properties and contact state. We use this system to classify objects, estimate grasping position, estimate poses of internal structures, and classify the types of extrinsic contacts an object is making with the environment. Using our contact type classification model, we tackle a standard long-horizon manipulation problem: peg insertion. We use a simple simulated transition model based on the performance of our sensor to train an imitation learning policy that is robust to imperfect predictions from the classifier. We finally demonstrate the policy on a UR5 robot with active acoustic sensing as the only feedback. Videos can be found at https://roamlab.github.io/vibecheck .