In-Hand Manipulation of Unknown Objects with Tactile Sensing for Insertion

TL;DR

This paper introduces a tactile sensing-based method for in-hand manipulation of unknown objects, enabling reorientation and insertion without prior object models, especially useful in occluded or cluttered environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel tactile-based approach using Bayesian optimization for in-hand object reorientation without relying on known models.

Findings

Successfully reorients objects in simulation

Reduces exploration time significantly

Effective in insertion tasks with unknown objects

Abstract

In this paper, we present a method to manipulate unknown objects in-hand using tactile sensing without relying on a known object model. In many cases, vision-only approaches may not be feasible; for example, due to occlusion in cluttered spaces. We address this limitation by introducing a method to reorient unknown objects using tactile sensing. It incrementally builds a probabilistic estimate of the object shape and pose during task-driven manipulation. Our approach uses Bayesian optimization to balance exploration of the global object shape with efficient task completion. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we apply it to a simulated Tactile-Enabled Roller Grasper, a gripper that rolls objects in hand while collecting tactile data. We evaluate our method on an insertion task with randomly generated objects and find that it reliably reorients objects while significantly reducing the exploration time.