Tactile-Driven Gentle Grasping for Human-Robot Collaborative Tasks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time tactile feedback control scheme for gentle, stable grasping using a soft robotic hand equipped with high-resolution tactile sensors, enabling improved manipulation and human-robot interaction.

Contribution

It presents a novel control approach utilizing tactile feedback from all fingertips for gentle grasping of diverse objects, advancing manipulation capabilities of soft robotic hands.

Findings

Successful grasp of 43 objects with varying geometry and stiffness

Real-time control loop enabling fast, reflexive grasp adjustments

Application to human-to-robot handover tasks

Abstract

This paper presents a control scheme for force sensitive, gentle grasping with a Pisa/IIT anthropomorphic SoftHand equipped with a miniaturised version of the TacTip optical tactile sensor on all five fingertips. The tactile sensors provide high-resolution information about a grasp and how the fingers interact with held objects. We first describe a series of hardware developments for performing asynchronous sensor data acquisition and processing, resulting in a fast control loop sufficient for real-time grasp control. We then develop a novel grasp controller that uses tactile feedback from all five fingertip sensors simultaneously to gently and stably grasp 43 objects of varying geometry and stiffness, which is then applied to a human-to-robot handover task. These developments open the door to more advanced manipulation with underactuated hands via fast reflexive control using high-resolution tactile sensing.