Tactile Sensing for Mobile Manipulation

Tactile information is valuable in determining properties of objects that are inaccessible from visual perception. In this paper, we present a tactile perception strategy that allows a mobile robot with tactile sensors in its gripper to measure a generic set of tactile features while manipulating an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on robotics 2011-06, Vol.27 (3), p.558-568
Main Authors: Chitta, S, Sturm, J, Piccoli, M, Burgard, W
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bottles
Comparative studies
Force
Grippers
Human
Human subjects
Humans
Liquids
Manipulators
Perception
Recognition
robot control
robot sensing systems
Robotics
Robots
Sensors
Tactile
tactile sensing
Tactile sensors
Training
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Summary:Tactile information is valuable in determining properties of objects that are inaccessible from visual perception. In this paper, we present a tactile perception strategy that allows a mobile robot with tactile sensors in its gripper to measure a generic set of tactile features while manipulating an object. We propose a switching velocity-force controller that grasps an object safely and reveals, at the same time, its deformation properties. By gently rolling the object, the robot can extract additional information about the contents of the object. As an application, we show that a robot can use these features to distinguish the internal state of bottles and cans-purely from tactile sensing-from a small training set. The robot can distinguish open from closed bottles and cans and full ones from empty ones. We also show how the high-frequency component in tactile information can be used to detect movement inside a container, e.g., in order to detect the presence of liquid. To prove that this is a hard recognition problem, we also conducted a comparative study with 17 human test subjects. The recognition rates of the human subjects were comparable with that of the robot.
ISSN:1552-3098
1941-0468
DOI:10.1109/TRO.2011.2134130