Tactile Estimation of Extrinsic Contact Patch for Stable Placement

TL;DR

This paper introduces a tactile sensing method for robots to estimate the stability of object placement by analyzing contact patches during contact formation, enabling more precise manipulation of complex objects.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to infer placement stability from tactile and force data, enhancing robotic manipulation capabilities.

Findings

Successful estimation of contact patches using tactile data

Demonstrated stability inference on various objects

Applicable to complex-shaped objects in manipulation tasks

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.