Control of contact via tactile sensing

Abstract

We present our approach to using tactile sensing in the feedback control of robot contact tasks. A general framework, called tactile servo, is first introduced. We then address the critical issue of how to model the state of contact in terms that are both sufficient for defining general contacts and conducive to bridging the gap between a robot task description and the information observable by a tactile sensor. We subsequently examine techniques for deriving tactile sensor models that are required for computing the state of contact from the sensor output. Two basic methods for mapping a tactile sensor image to the contact state variables are introduced: one based on explicit inverse modeling, and the other on numerical tactile Jacobian. In both cases, moments of the tactile sensor image are used as the features that capture the necessary information about contact. The theoretical development is supported by extensive experiments, which include edge tracking, object shape construction and object manipulation.