Robotics: Science and Systems XIX

Rotating without Seeing: Towards In-hand Dexterity through Touch

Zhao-Heng Yin, Binghao Huang, Yuzhe Qin, Qifeng Chen, Xiaolong Wang

Abstract:

Tactile information plays a critical role in human dexterity. It reveals useful contact information that may not be inferred directly from vision. In fact, humans can even perform in-hand dexterous manipulation without using vision. Can we enable the same ability for the multi-finger robot hand? In this paper, we propose to perform in-hand object rotation using only touching without seeing the object. Instead of relying on precise tactile sensing in a small region, we introduce a new system design using dense binary force sensors (touch or no touch) overlaying one side of the whole robot hand (palm, finger links, fingertips). Such a design is low-cost, giving a larger coverage of the object, and minimizing the Sim2Real gap at the same time. We train an in-hand rotation policy using Reinforcement Learning on diverse objects in simulation. Relying on touch-only sensing, we can directly deploy the policy in a real robot hand and rotate novel objects that are not presented in training. Extensive ablations are performed on how tactile information help in-hand manipulation.

Download:

Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Yin-RSS-23, 
    AUTHOR    = {Zhao-Heng Yin AND Binghao Huang AND Yuzhe Qin AND Qifeng Chen AND Xiaolong Wang}, 
    TITLE     = {{Rotating without Seeing: Towards In-hand Dexterity through Touch}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2023}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Daegu, Republic of Korea}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2023.XIX.036} 
}