Distinguishing sliding from slipping during object pushing

Abstract

The advent of advanced tactile sensing technology triggered the development of methods to employ them for grasp evaluation, online slip detection, and tactile servoing. In contrast to recent approaches to slip detection, distinguishing slip from non-slip conditions, we consider the more difficult task of distinguishing different types of slippage. Particularly we consider an object pushing task, where forces can only be applied from the top. In that case, the robot needs to notice when the object successfully moves vs. when the object gets stuck while the finger slips over its surface. As an example, consider the task of pushing around a piece of paper. We propose and evaluate three different convolutional network architectures and proof the applicability of the method for online classification in a robot pushing task.