Publikation
Placing by Touching: An Empirical Study on the Importance of Tactile Sensing for Precise Object Placing
Luca Lach; Niklas Funk; Robert Haschke; Séverin Lemaignan; Helge Joachim Ritter; Jan Peters; Georgia Chalvatzaki
In: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Pages 8964-8971, ArXiv, 2023.
Zusammenfassung
This work deals with a practical everyday prob-
lem: stable object placement on flat surfaces starting from
unknown initial poses. Common object-placing approaches
require either complete scene specifications or extrinsic sensor
measurements, e.g., cameras, that occasionally suffer from
occlusions. We propose a novel approach for stable object
placing that combines tactile feedback and proprioceptive
sensing. We devise a neural architecture that estimates a
rotation matrix, resulting in a corrective gripper movement that
aligns the object with the placing surface for the subsequent
object manipulation. We compare models with different sensing
modalities, such as force-torque and an external motion capture
system, in real-world object placing tasks with different objects.
The experimental evaluation of our placing policies with a
set of unseen everyday objects reveals significant generaliza-
tion of our proposed pipeline, suggesting that tactile sensing
plays a vital role in the intrinsic understanding of robotic
dexterous object manipulation. Code, models, and supplemen-
tary videos are available on https://sites.google.com/
view/placing-by-touching
