Inferring Object Properties with a Tactile-Sensing Array Given Varying Joint Stiffness and Velocity
Abstract
Whole-arm tactile sensing enables a robot to sense contact and infer contact properties across its entire arm. Within this paper, we demonstrate that using data-driven methods, a humanoid robot can infer mechanical properties of objects from contact with its forearm during a simple reaching motion. A key issue is the extent to which the performance of data-driven methods can generalize to robot actions that differ from those used during training. To investigate this, we developed an idealized physics-based lumped element model of a robot with a compliant joint making contact with an object. Using this physics-based model, we performed experiments with varied robot, object and environment parameters. We also collected data from a tactile-sensing forearm on a real robot as it made contact with various objects during a simple reaching motion with varied arm velocities and joint stiffnesses. The robot used 1-nearest-neighbor (1-NN) classifiers, hidden Markov models (HMMs), and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks to infer two object properties (hard versus soft and moved versus unmoved) based on features of time-varying tactile sensor data (maximum force, contact area, and contact motion). We found that, in contrast to 1-NN, the performance of LSTMs (with sufficient data availability) and multivariate HMMs successfully generalized to new robot motions with distinct velocities and joint stiffnesses. Compared to single features, using multiple features gave the best results for both experiments with physics-based models and a real-robot.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Feb 01, 2018
- Source ID
- 10.1142/s0219843617500244
Entities
People
- Charles C. Kemp
- James M. Rehg
- Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
Organizations
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- Division of Information and Intelligent Systems
- Georgia Tech
- Office of Emerging Frontiers and Multidisciplinary Activities