Diffusion-based Virtual Fixtures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel diffusion-based virtual fixture method for tactile robotics that constrains robot actions on surfaces using surface geometry and point cloud data, enhancing teleoperation precision.

Contribution

It proposes a new surface-based virtual fixture formulation that diffuses behaviors over surfaces considering geometry, working directly on noisy, partial point clouds, and generalizes behavior across complex surfaces.

Findings

Successfully regulates contact force and tangential speed based on surface position

Guides robots to targets while avoiding restricted surface regions

Works effectively with noisy, partial point cloud data

Abstract

Virtual fixtures assist human operators in teleoperation settings by constraining their actions. This extended abstract introduces a novel virtual fixture formulation \emph{on surfaces} for tactile robotics tasks. Unlike existing methods, our approach constrains the behavior based on the position on the surface and generalizes it over the surface by considering the distance (metric) on the surface. Our method works directly on possibly noisy and partial point clouds collected via a camera. Given a set of regions on the surface together with their desired behaviors, our method diffuses the behaviors across the entire surface by taking into account the surface geometry. We demonstrate our method's ability in two simulated experiments (i) to regulate contact force magnitude or tangential speed based on surface position and (ii) to guide the robot to targets while avoiding restricted regions defined on the surface. All source codes, experimental data, and videos are available as open access at https://sites.google.com/view/diffusion-virtual-fixtures