TR2024-053

Tactile Estimation of Extrinsic Contact Patch for Stable Placement

    •  Ota, K., Jha, D.K., Jatavallabhula, K., Kanezaki, A., Tenenbaum, J.B., "Tactile Estimation of Extrinsic Contact Patch for Stable Placement", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), DOI: 10.1109/​ICRA57147.2024.10611504}, May 2024, pp. 13876-13882.
      BibTeX TR2024-053 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Ota2024may2,
      • author = {Ota, Kei and Jha, Devesh K. and Jatavallabhula, Krishna and Kanezaki, Asako and Tenenbaum, Joshua B.}},
      • title = {Tactile Estimation of Extrinsic Contact Patch for Stable Placement},
      • booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
      • year = 2024,
      • pages = {13876--13882},
      • month = may,
      • publisher = {IEEE},
      • doi = {10.1109/ICRA57147.2024.10611504}},
      • isbn = {979-8-3503-8457-4},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-053}
      • }
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  • Research Area:

    Robotics

Abstract:

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.

 

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  • Related Publication

  •  Ota, K., Jha, D.K., Jatavallabhula, K.M., Kanezaki, A., Tenenbaum, J.B., "Tactile Estimation of Extrinsic Contact Patch for Stable Placement", arXiv, September 2023.
    BibTeX arXiv
    • @article{Ota2023sep,
    • author = {Ota, Kei and Jha, Devesh K. and Jatavallabhula, Krishna Murthy and Kanezaki, Asako and Tenenbaum, Joshua B.},
    • title = {Tactile Estimation of Extrinsic Contact Patch for Stable Placement},
    • journal = {arXiv},
    • year = 2023,
    • month = sep,
    • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14552}
    • }