Abstract
Whole-arm tactile sensing enables a robot to sense contact and infer contact properties across its entire arm. Within this paper, we demonstrate that using data-driven methods, a humanoid robot can infer mechanical properties of objects from contact with its forearm during a simple reaching motion. A key issue is the extent to which the performance of data-driven methods can generalize to robot actions that differ from those used during training. To investigate this, we developed an idealized physics-based lumped element model of a robot with a compliant joint making contact with an object. Using this physics-based model, we performed experiments with varied robot, object and environment parameters. We also collected data from a tactile-sensing forearm on a real robot as it made contact with various objects during a simple reaching motion with varied arm velocities and joint stiffnesses. The robot used 1-nearest-neighbor (1-NN) classifiers, hidden Markov models (HMMs), and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks to infer two object properties (hard versus soft and moved versus unmoved) based on features of time-varying tactile sensor data (maximum force, contact area, and contact motion). We found that, in contrast to 1-NN, the performance of LSTMs (with sufficient data availability) and multivariate HMMs successfully generalized to new robot motions with distinct velocities and joint stiffnesses. Compared to single features, using multiple features gave the best results for both experiments with physics-based models and a real-robot.
Highlights
Manipulation in unstructured environments with high clutter is di±cult due to a variety of factors, including uncertainty about the state-of-the-world, a lack ofThis is an Open Access article published by World Scientic Publishing Company
We used both univariate hidden Markov models (HMMs), multivariate HMMs, and long short-term memory (LSTM) for classication to model the temporal trends of all combinations of the three-feature vectors: maximum force (Fmax), contact area (a) and contact motion (d)
We developed algorithms to infer object properties using haptic information obtained from contact between a robot's tactile-sensing forearm and objects in the robot's environment
Summary
Manipulation in unstructured environments with high clutter is di±cult due to a variety of factors, including uncertainty about the state-of-the-world, a lack of. This is an Open Access article published by World Scientic Publishing Company. When contact occurs with tactile sensors, the robot has an opportunity to acquire information. By fully covering the robot's manipulator with tactile sensors, the robot is likely to have more opportunities to acquire useful information through contact.
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