# Making Sense of Vision and Touch: Learning Multimodal Representations for Contact-Rich Tasks

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a self-supervised learning approach to create compact multimodal sensory representations that enhance the efficiency and robustness of contact-rich manipulation policies in unstructured environments, demonstrated on peg insertion tasks.

## Contribution

It proposes a novel self-supervised multimodal representation learning method that improves sample efficiency and generalization in robot manipulation tasks involving vision and touch.

## Key findings

- The method generalizes across different geometries and configurations.
- It is robust to external perturbations.
- Effective in both simulation and real-world experiments.

## Abstract

Contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments often require both haptic and visual feedback. It is non-trivial to manually design a robot controller that combines these modalities which have very different characteristics. While deep reinforcement learning has shown success in learning control policies for high-dimensional inputs, these algorithms are generally intractable to deploy on real robots due to sample complexity. In this work, we use self-supervision to learn a compact and multimodal representation of our sensory inputs, which can then be used to improve the sample efficiency of our policy learning. Evaluating our method on a peg insertion task, we show that it generalizes over varying geometries, configurations, and clearances, while being robust to external perturbations. We also systematically study different self-supervised learning objectives and representation learning architectures. Results are presented in simulation and on a physical robot.