ACROSS: A Deformation-Based Cross-Modal Representation for Robotic Tactile Perception

Tactile perception is essential for human interaction with the environment and is becoming increasingly crucial in robotics. Tactile sensors like the BioTac mimic human fingertips and provide detailed interaction data. Despite its utility in applications like slip detection and object identification, this sensor is now deprecated, making many existing valuable datasets obsolete. However, recreating similar datasets with newer sensor technologies is both tedious and time-consuming. Therefore, it is crucial to adapt these existing datasets for use with new setups and modalities. In response, we introduce ACROSS, a novel framework for translating data between tactile sensors by exploiting sensor deformation information. We demonstrate the approach by translating BioTac signals into the DIGIT sensor. Our framework consists of first converting the input signals into 3D deformation meshes. We then transition from the 3D deformation mesh of one sensor to the mesh of another, and finally convert the generated 3D deformation mesh into the corresponding output space. We demonstrate our approach to the most challenging problem of going from a low-dimensional tactile representation to a high-dimensional one. In particular, we transfer the tactile signals of a BioTac sensor to DIGIT tactile images. Our approach enables the continued use of valuable datasets and the exchange of data between groups with different setups.

Transferring Tactile Data Across Sensors

Tactile perception is essential for human interaction with the environment and is becoming increasingly crucial in robotics. Tactile sensors like the BioTac mimic human fingertips and provide detailed interaction data. Despite its utility in applications like slip detection and object identification, this sensor is now deprecated, making many existing datasets obsolete. This article introduces a novel method for translating data between tactile sensors by exploiting sensor deformation information rather than output signals. We demonstrate the approach by translating BioTac signals into the DIGIT sensor. Our framework consists of three steps: first, converting signal data into corresponding 3D deformation meshes; second, translating these 3D deformation meshes from one sensor to another; and third, generating output images using the converted meshes. Our approach enables the continued use of valuable datasets.

Optimizing BioTac Simulation for Realistic Tactile Perception

Tactile sensing presents a promising opportunity for enhancing the interaction capabilities of today's robots. BioTac is a commonly used tactile sensor that enables robots to perceive and respond to physical tactile stimuli. However, the sensor's non-linearity poses challenges in simulating its behavior. In this paper, we first investigate a BioTac simulation that uses temperature, force, and contact point positions to predict the sensor outputs. We show that training with BioTac temperature readings does not yield accurate sensor output predictions during deployment. Consequently, we tested three alternative models, i.e., an XGBoost regressor, a neural network, and a transformer encoder. We train these models without temperature readings and provide a detailed investigation of the window size of the input vectors. We demonstrate that we achieve statistically significant improvements over the baseline network. Furthermore, our results reveal that the XGBoost regressor and transformer outperform traditional feed-forward neural networks in this task. We make all our code and results available online on https://github.com/wzaielamri/Optimizing_BioTac_Simulation.

Continual Domain Randomization

Domain Randomization (DR) is commonly used for sim2real transfer of reinforcement learning (RL) policies in robotics. Most DR approaches require a simulator with a fixed set of tunable parameters from the start of the training, from which the parameters are randomized simultaneously to train a robust model for use in the real world. However, the combined randomization of many parameters increases the task difficulty and might result in sub-optimal policies. To address this problem and to provide a more flexible training process, we propose Continual Domain Randomization (CDR) for RL that combines domain randomization with continual learning to enable sequential training in simulation on a subset of randomization parameters at a time. Starting from a model trained in a non-randomized simulation where the task is easier to solve, the model is trained on a sequence of randomizations, and continual learning is employed to remember the effects of previous randomizations. Our robotic reaching and grasping tasks experiments show that the model trained in this fashion learns effectively in simulation and performs robustly on the real robot while matching or outperforming baselines that employ combined randomization or sequential randomization without continual learning. Our code and videos are available at https://continual-dr.github.io/.

A Biomimetic Fingerprint for Robotic Tactile Sensing

Tactile sensors have been developed since the early '70s and have greatly improved, but there are still no widely adopted solutions. Various technologies, such as capacitive, piezoelectric, piezoresistive, optical, and magnetic, are used in haptic sensing. However, most sensors are not mechanically robust for many applications and cannot cope well with curved or sizeable surfaces. Aiming to address this problem, we present a 3D-printed fingerprint pattern to enhance the body-borne vibration signal for dynamic tactile feedback. The 3D-printed fingerprint patterns were designed and tested for an RH8D Adult size Robot Hand. The patterns significantly increased the signal's power to over 11 times the baseline. A public haptic dataset including 52 objects of several materials was created using the best fingerprint pattern and material.

Quantifying the Effect of Feedback Frequency in Interactive Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Tasks

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become widely adopted in robot control. Despite many successes, one major persisting problem can be very low data efficiency. One solution is interactive feedback, which has been shown to speed up RL considerably. As a result, there is an abundance of different strategies, which are, however, primarily tested on discrete grid-world and small scale optimal control scenarios. In the literature, there is no consensus about which feedback frequency is optimal or at which time the feedback is most beneficial. To resolve these discrepancies we isolate and quantify the effect of feedback frequency in robotic tasks with continuous state and action spaces. The experiments encompass inverse kinematics learning for robotic manipulator arms of different complexity. We show that seemingly contradictory reported phenomena occur at different complexity levels. Furthermore, our results suggest that no single ideal feedback frequency exists. Rather that feedback frequency should be changed as the agent's proficiency in the task increases.

Analysis of Randomization Effects on Sim2Real Transfer in Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation Tasks

Randomization is currently a widely used approach in Sim2Real transfer for data-driven learning algorithms in robotics. Still, most Sim2Real studies report results for a specific randomization technique and often on a highly customized robotic system, making it difficult to evaluate different randomization approaches systematically. To address this problem, we define an easy-to-reproduce experimental setup for a robotic reach-and-balance manipulator task, which can serve as a benchmark for comparison. We compare four randomization strategies with three randomized parameters both in simulation and on a real robot. Our results show that more randomization helps in Sim2Real transfer, yet it can also harm the ability of the algorithm to find a good policy in simulation. Fully randomized simulations and fine-tuning show differentiated results and translate better to the real robot than the other approaches tested.

Visuo-Haptic Object Perception for Robots: An Overview

This article summarizes the current state of multimodal object perception for robotic applications. It covers aspects of biological inspiration, sensor technologies, data sets, and sensory data processing for object recognition and grasping. Firstly, the biological basis of multimodal object perception is outlined. Then the sensing technologies and data collection strategies are discussed. Next, an introduction to the main computational aspects is presented, highlighting a few representative articles for each main application area, including object recognition, object manipulation and grasping, texture recognition, and transfer learning. Finally, informed by the current advancements in each area, this article outlines promising new research directions.

AU Dataset for Visuo-Haptic Object Recognition for Robots

Multimodal object recognition is still an emerging field. Thus, publicly available datasets are still rare and of small size. This dataset was developed to help fill this void and presents multimodal data for 63 objects with some visual and haptic ambiguity. The dataset contains visual, kinesthetic and tactile (audio/vibrations) data. To completely solve sensory ambiguity, sensory integration/fusion would be required. This report describes the creation and structure of the dataset. The first section explains the underlying approach used to capture the visual and haptic properties of the objects. The second section describes the technical aspects (experimental setup) needed for the collection of the data. The third section introduces the objects, while the final section describes the structure and content of the dataset.

Speeding up the Hyperparameter Optimization of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Most learning algorithms require the practitioner to manually set the values of many hyperparameters before the learning process can begin. However, with modern algorithms, the evaluation of a given hyperparameter setting can take a considerable amount of time and the search space is often very high-dimensional. We suggest using a lower-dimensional representation of the original data to quickly identify promising areas in the hyperparameter space. This information can then be used to initialize the optimization algorithm for the original, higher-dimensional data. We compare this approach with the standard procedure of optimizing the hyperparameters only on the original input. We perform experiments with various state-of-the-art hyperparameter optimization algorithms such as random search, the tree of parzen estimators (TPEs), sequential model-based algorithm configuration (SMAC), and a genetic algorithm (GA). Our experiments indicate that it is possible to speed up the optimization process by using lower-dimensional data representations at the beginning, while increasing the dimensionality of the input later in the optimization process. This is independent of the underlying optimization procedure, making the approach promising for many existing hyperparameter optimization algorithms.