FusionSense: Bridging Common Sense, Vision, and Touch for Robust Sparse-View Reconstruction

Humans effortlessly integrate common-sense knowledge with sensory input from vision and touch to understand their surroundings. Emulating this capability, we introduce FusionSense, a novel 3D reconstruction framework that enables robots to fuse priors from foundation models with highly sparse observations from vision and tactile sensors. FusionSense addresses three key challenges: (i) How can robots efficiently acquire robust global shape information about the surrounding scene and objects? (ii) How can robots strategically select touch points on the object using geometric and common-sense priors? (iii) How can partial observations such as tactile signals improve the overall representation of the object? Our framework employs 3D Gaussian Splatting as a core representation and incorporates a hierarchical optimization strategy involving global structure construction, object visual hull pruning and local geometric constraints. This advancement results in fast and robust perception in environments with traditionally challenging objects that are transparent, reflective, or dark, enabling more downstream manipulation or navigation tasks. Experiments on real-world data suggest that our framework outperforms previously state-of-the-art sparse-view methods. All code and data are open-sourced on the project website.

MM-CamObj: A Comprehensive Multimodal Dataset for Camouflaged Object Scenarios

Large visual-language models (LVLMs) have achieved great success in multiple applications. However, they still encounter challenges in complex scenes, especially those involving camouflaged objects. This is primarily due to the lack of samples related to camouflaged scenes in the training dataset. To mitigate this issue, we construct the MM-CamObj dataset for the first time, comprising two subsets: CamObj-Align and CamObj-Instruct. Specifically, CamObj-Align contains 11,363 image-text pairs, and it is designed for VL alignment and injecting rich knowledge of camouflaged scenes into LVLMs. CamObj-Instruct is collected for fine-tuning the LVLMs with improved instruction-following capabilities, and it includes 11,363 images and 68,849 conversations with diverse instructions. Based on the MM-CamObj dataset, we propose the CamObj-Llava, an LVLM specifically designed for addressing tasks in camouflaged scenes. To facilitate our model's effective acquisition of knowledge about camouflaged objects and scenes, we introduce a curriculum learning strategy with six distinct modes. Additionally, we construct the CamObj-Bench to evaluate the existing LVLMs' capabilities of understanding, recognition, localization and count in camouflage scenes. This benchmark includes 600 images and 7 tasks, with a total of 9,449 questions. Extensive experiments are conducted on the CamObj-Bench with CamObj-Llava, 8 existing open-source and 3 closed-source LVLMs. Surprisingly, the results indicate that our model achieves a 25.84% improvement in 4 out of 7 tasks compared to GPT-4o. Code and datasets will be available at https://github.com/JCruan519/MM-CamObj.

An Intelligent Robotic System for Perceptive Pancake Batter Stirring and Precise Pouring

Cooking robots have long been desired by the commercial market, while the technical challenge is still significant. A major difficulty comes from the demand of perceiving and handling liquid with different properties. This paper presents a robot system that mixes batter and makes pancakes out of it, where understanding and handling the viscous liquid is an essential component. The system integrates Haptic Sensing and control algorithms to autonomously stir flour and water to achieve the desired batter uniformity, estimate the batter's properties such as the water-flour ratio and liquid level, as well as perform precise manipulations to pour the batter into any specified shape. Experimental results show the system's capability to always produce batter of desired uniformity, estimate water-flour ratio and liquid level precisely, and accurately pour it into complex shapes. This research showcases the potential for robots to assist in kitchens and step towards commercial culinary automation.

Scalable, Simulation-Guided Compliant Tactile Finger Design

Compliant grippers enable robots to work with humans in unstructured environments. In general, these grippers can improve with tactile sensing to estimate the state of objects around them to precisely manipulate objects. However, co-designing compliant structures with high-resolution tactile sensing is a challenging task. We propose a simulation framework for the end-to-end forward design of GelSight Fin Ray sensors. Our simulation framework consists of mechanical simulation using the finite element method (FEM) and optical simulation including physically based rendering (PBR). To simulate the fluorescent paint used in these GelSight Fin Rays, we propose an efficient method that can be directly integrated in PBR. Using the simulation framework, we investigate design choices available in the compliant grippers, namely gel pad shapes, illumination conditions, Fin Ray gripper sizes, and Fin Ray stiffness. This infrastructure enables faster design and prototype time frames of new Fin Ray sensors that have various sensing areas, ranging from 48 mm $\times$ \18 mm to 70 mm $\times$ 35 mm. Given the parameters we choose, we can thus optimize different Fin Ray designs and show their utility in grasping day-to-day objects.

Kitchen Artist: Precise Control of Liquid Dispensing for Gourmet Plating

Manipulating liquid is widely required for many tasks, especially in cooking. A common way to address this is extruding viscous liquid from a squeeze bottle. In this work, our goal is to create a sauce plating robot, which requires precise control of the thickness of squeezed liquids on a surface. Different liquids demand different manipulation policies. We command the robot to tilt the container and monitor the liquid response using a force sensor to identify liquid properties. Based on the liquid properties, we predict the liquid behavior with fixed squeezing motions in a data-driven way and calculate the required drawing speed for the desired stroke size. This open-loop system works effectively even without sensor feedback. Our experiments demonstrate accurate stroke size control across different liquids and fill levels. We show that understanding liquid properties can facilitate effective liquid manipulation. More importantly, our dish garnishing robot has a wide range of applications and holds significant commercialization potential.

Robotic Defect Inspection with Visual and Tactile Perception for Large-scale Components

In manufacturing processes, surface inspection is a key requirement for quality assessment and damage localization. Due to this, automated surface anomaly detection has become a promising area of research in various industrial inspection systems. A particular challenge in industries with large-scale components, like aircraft and heavy machinery, is inspecting large parts with very small defect dimensions. Moreover, these parts can be of curved shapes. To address this challenge, we present a 2-stage multi-modal inspection pipeline with visual and tactile sensing. Our approach combines the best of both visual and tactile sensing by identifying and localizing defects using a global view (vision) and using the localized area for tactile scanning for identifying remaining defects. To benchmark our approach, we propose a novel real-world dataset with multiple metallic defect types per image, collected in the production environments on real aerospace manufacturing parts, as well as online robot experiments in two environments. Our approach is able to identify 85% defects using Stage I and identify 100% defects after Stage II. The dataset is publicly available at https://zenodo.org/record/8327713

Customizing Textile and Tactile Skins for Interactive Industrial Robots

Tactile skins made from textiles enhance robot-human interaction by localizing contact points and measuring contact forces. This paper presents a solution for rapidly fabricating, calibrating, and deploying these skins on industrial robot arms. The novel automated skin calibration procedure maps skin locations to robot geometry and calibrates contact force. Through experiments on a FANUC LR Mate 200id/7L industrial robot, we demonstrate that tactile skins made from textiles can be effectively used for human-robot interaction in industrial environments, and can provide unique opportunities in robot control and learning, making them a promising technology for enhancing robot perception and interaction.

Estimating Properties of Solid Particles Inside Container Using Touch Sensing

Solid particles, such as rice and coffee beans, are commonly stored in containers and are ubiquitous in our daily lives. Understanding those particles' properties could help us make later decisions or perform later manipulation tasks such as pouring. Humans typically interact with the containers to get an understanding of the particles inside them, but it is still a challenge for robots to achieve that. This work utilizes tactile sensing to estimate multiple properties of solid particles enclosed in the container, specifically, content mass, content volume, particle size, and particle shape. We design a sequence of robot actions to interact with the container. Based on physical understanding, we extract static force/torque value from the F/T sensor, vibration-related features and topple-related features from the newly designed high-speed GelSight tactile sensor to estimate those four particle properties. We test our method on $37$ very different daily particles, including powder, rice, beans, tablets, etc. Experiments show that our approach is able to estimate content mass with an error of $1.8$ g, content volume with an error of $6.1$ ml, particle size with an error of $1.1$ mm, and achieves an accuracy of $75.6$% for particle shape estimation. In addition, our method can generalize to unseen particles with unknown volumes. By estimating these particle properties, our method can help robots to better perceive the granular media and help with different manipulation tasks in daily life and industry.

Controllable Visual-Tactile Synthesis

Deep generative models have various content creation applications such as graphic design, e-commerce, and virtual Try-on. However, current works mainly focus on synthesizing realistic visual outputs, often ignoring other sensory modalities, such as touch, which limits physical interaction with users. In this work, we leverage deep generative models to create a multi-sensory experience where users can touch and see the synthesized object when sliding their fingers on a haptic surface. The main challenges lie in the significant scale discrepancy between vision and touch sensing and the lack of explicit mapping from touch sensing data to a haptic rendering device. To bridge this gap, we collect high-resolution tactile data with a GelSight sensor and create a new visuotactile clothing dataset. We then develop a conditional generative model that synthesizes both visual and tactile outputs from a single sketch. We evaluate our method regarding image quality and tactile rendering accuracy. Finally, we introduce a pipeline to render high-quality visual and tactile outputs on an electroadhesion-based haptic device for an immersive experience, allowing for challenging materials and editable sketch inputs.

Cable Routing and Assembly using Tactile-driven Motion Primitives

Manipulating cables is challenging for robots because of the infinite degrees of freedom of the cables and frequent occlusion by the gripper and the environment. These challenges are further complicated by the dexterous nature of the operations required for cable routing and assembly, such as weaving and inserting, hampering common solutions with vision-only sensing. In this paper, we propose to integrate tactile-guided low-level motion control with high-level vision-based task parsing for a challenging task: cable routing and assembly on a reconfigurable task board. Specifically, we build a library of tactile-guided motion primitives using a fingertip GelSight sensor, where each primitive reliably accomplishes an operation such as cable following and weaving. The overall task is inferred via visual perception given a goal configuration image, and then used to generate the primitive sequence. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of individual tactile-guided primitives and the integrated end-to-end solution, significantly outperforming the method without tactile sensing. Our reconfigurable task setup and proposed baselines provide a benchmark for future research in cable manipulation. More details and video are presented in \url{https://helennn.github.io/cable-manip/}