Analysing the Interplay of Vision and Touch for Dexterous Insertion Tasks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how combining vision and tactile sensing improves robotic dexterous insertion tasks, demonstrating that tactile feedback significantly enhances success rates in challenging, contact-rich environments.

Contribution

It provides an extensive analysis of visual and tactile interplay, highlighting tactile sensing's critical role in improving robotic insertion performance in complex scenarios.

Findings

Tactile sensing greatly improves success rates in challenging insertions.

Visual and tactile feedback integration enhances robotic manipulation.

Insights for designing better multi-modal robotic control systems.

Abstract

Robotic insertion tasks remain challenging due to uncertainties in perception and the need for precise control, particularly in unstructured environments. While humans seamlessly combine vision and touch for such tasks, effectively integrating these modalities in robotic systems is still an open problem. Our work presents an extensive analysis of the interplay between visual and tactile feedback during dexterous insertion tasks, showing that tactile sensing can greatly enhance success rates on challenging insertions with tight tolerances and varied hole orientations that vision alone cannot solve. These findings provide valuable insights for designing more effective multi-modal robotic control systems and highlight the critical role of tactile feedback in contact-rich manipulation tasks.