Tactile SLAM: Real-time inference of shape and pose from planar pushing

Sudharshan Suresh, Maria Bauza, Kuan-Ting Yu, Joshua G. Mangelson, Alberto Rodriguez, Michael Kaess
2021 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)  
Tactile perception is central to robot manipulation in unstructured environments. However, it requires contact, and a mature implementation must infer object models while also accounting for the motion induced by the interaction. In this work, we present a method to estimate both object shape and pose in real-time from a stream of tactile measurements. This is applied towards tactile exploration of an unknown object by planar pushing. We consider this as an online SLAM problem with a
more » ... ic shape representation. Our formulation of tactile inference alternates between Gaussian process implicit surface regression and pose estimation on a factor graph. Through a combination of local Gaussian processes and fixedlag smoothing, we infer object shape and pose in real-time. We evaluate our system across different objects in both simulated and real-world planar pushing tasks.
doi:10.1109/icra48506.2021.9562060 fatcat:zyvz72aepjcejp26tnesj72s3e