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Blocks World of Touch: Exploiting the Advantages of All-Around Finger Sensing in Robot Grasping

Tactile sensing is an essential capability for a robot to perform manipulation tasks in cluttered environments. While larger areas can be assessed instantly with cameras, Lidars, and other remote sensors, tactile sensors can reduce their measurement uncertainties and gain information of the physical...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Gomes, Daniel Fernandes, Lin, Zhonglin, Luo, Shan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7805632/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33501310
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2020.541661
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author Gomes, Daniel Fernandes
Lin, Zhonglin
Luo, Shan
author_facet Gomes, Daniel Fernandes
Lin, Zhonglin
Luo, Shan
author_sort Gomes, Daniel Fernandes
collection PubMed
description Tactile sensing is an essential capability for a robot to perform manipulation tasks in cluttered environments. While larger areas can be assessed instantly with cameras, Lidars, and other remote sensors, tactile sensors can reduce their measurement uncertainties and gain information of the physical interactions between the objects and the robot end-effector that is not accessible via remote sensors. In this paper, we introduce the novel tactile sensor GelTip that has the shape of a finger and can sense contacts on any location of its surface. This contrasts to other camera-based tactile sensors that either only have a flat sensing surface, or a compliant tip of a limited sensing area, and our proposed GelTip sensor is able to detect contacts from all the directions, like a human finger. The sensor uses a camera located at its base to track the deformations of the opaque elastomer that covers its hollow, rigid, and transparent body. Because of this design, a gripper equipped with GelTip sensors is capable of simultaneously monitoring contacts happening inside and outside its grasp closure. Our extensive experiments show that the GelTip sensor can effectively localize these contacts at different locations of the finger body, with a small localization error of approximately 5 mm on average, and under 1 mm in the best cases. Furthermore, our experiments in a Blocks World environment demonstrate the advantages, and possibly a necessity, of leveraging all-around touch sensing in manipulation tasks. In particular, the experiments show that the contacts at different moments of the reach-to-grasp movements can be sensed using our novel GelTip sensor.
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spelling pubmed-78056322021-01-25 Blocks World of Touch: Exploiting the Advantages of All-Around Finger Sensing in Robot Grasping Gomes, Daniel Fernandes Lin, Zhonglin Luo, Shan Front Robot AI Robotics and AI Tactile sensing is an essential capability for a robot to perform manipulation tasks in cluttered environments. While larger areas can be assessed instantly with cameras, Lidars, and other remote sensors, tactile sensors can reduce their measurement uncertainties and gain information of the physical interactions between the objects and the robot end-effector that is not accessible via remote sensors. In this paper, we introduce the novel tactile sensor GelTip that has the shape of a finger and can sense contacts on any location of its surface. This contrasts to other camera-based tactile sensors that either only have a flat sensing surface, or a compliant tip of a limited sensing area, and our proposed GelTip sensor is able to detect contacts from all the directions, like a human finger. The sensor uses a camera located at its base to track the deformations of the opaque elastomer that covers its hollow, rigid, and transparent body. Because of this design, a gripper equipped with GelTip sensors is capable of simultaneously monitoring contacts happening inside and outside its grasp closure. Our extensive experiments show that the GelTip sensor can effectively localize these contacts at different locations of the finger body, with a small localization error of approximately 5 mm on average, and under 1 mm in the best cases. Furthermore, our experiments in a Blocks World environment demonstrate the advantages, and possibly a necessity, of leveraging all-around touch sensing in manipulation tasks. In particular, the experiments show that the contacts at different moments of the reach-to-grasp movements can be sensed using our novel GelTip sensor. Frontiers Media S.A. 2020-11-19 /pmc/articles/PMC7805632/ /pubmed/33501310 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2020.541661 Text en Copyright © 2020 Gomes, Lin and Luo. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Robotics and AI
Gomes, Daniel Fernandes
Lin, Zhonglin
Luo, Shan
Blocks World of Touch: Exploiting the Advantages of All-Around Finger Sensing in Robot Grasping
title Blocks World of Touch: Exploiting the Advantages of All-Around Finger Sensing in Robot Grasping
title_full Blocks World of Touch: Exploiting the Advantages of All-Around Finger Sensing in Robot Grasping
title_fullStr Blocks World of Touch: Exploiting the Advantages of All-Around Finger Sensing in Robot Grasping
title_full_unstemmed Blocks World of Touch: Exploiting the Advantages of All-Around Finger Sensing in Robot Grasping
title_short Blocks World of Touch: Exploiting the Advantages of All-Around Finger Sensing in Robot Grasping
title_sort blocks world of touch: exploiting the advantages of all-around finger sensing in robot grasping
topic Robotics and AI
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7805632/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33501310
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2020.541661
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