Robotic grasp control with high-resolution combined tactile and proximity sensing

Abstract

We have proposed a multimodal sensing with optical device and its application to robotic grasp control. The proposed device provides both tactile and proximity information with high spatial resolution on the same scale of coordinates, that is necessary while grasping small and complicated-shaped objects using a robotic hand. In our proposed device, tactile information is obtained as infrared image through a light conductive plate, which allows the capture of a tactile image of high spatial resolution using a camera. Proximity information is detected based on stereo matching of a pair of images obtained by two cameras. By using a compound-eye camera, we constructed a compact device so that the sensor can be mounted on the robotic hand. Through experiments with 6 DoF robotic arm and robotic hand equipped with the proposed sensing device, we show that the robotic motion for searching, approaching and grasping can be controlled based on sensor information obtained from only the proposed device. In addition, our combined sensing approach enables an adaptive grasping motion of the robotic hand.