Robotics: Science and Systems XXII

More with LESS – Local Scene Representations for Tactile Imaging

Zohar Rimon, Elisei Shafer, Tal Tepper, Daniel Kozin, Alon Malka, Roy Holland, Aviv Tamar

Abstract:

Tactile imaging seeks to reconstruct the internal structure of soft objects through touch sensing, with applications in medical diagnosis and robotic manipulation. Recent self-supervised learning approaches have shown promising results, but rely on global, unstructured representations and robot-controlled sensing, limiting generalization and practical use. We propose Local Encoder for Spatial Sensing (LESS), an object-centric tactile representation that exploits the local nature of touch. The tactile scene is modeled as a grid of recurrent encoders with local receptive fields, whose states are fused to reconstruct 2D or 3D images of internal structure. This compositional design enables strong generalization: models trained on single-inclusion phantoms accurately image objects with multiple inclusions and varying sizes. The local structure further supports spatial uncertainty estimation. In addition, we enable hand-held tactile imaging via external pose tracking and human-like palpation data, and extend tactile imaging to full 3D reconstruction.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{RimonZ-RSS-26, 
    AUTHOR    = {Zohar Rimon AND Elisei Shafer AND Tal Tepper AND Daniel Kozin AND Alon Malka AND Roy Holland AND Aviv Tamar}, 
    TITLE     = {{More with LESS – Local Scene Representations for Tactile Imaging}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2026}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Sydney, Australia}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2026.XXII.167} 
}