Soft-Bubble grippers for robust and perceptive manipulation

Manipulation in cluttered environments like homes requires stable grasps, precise placement and robustness against external contact. We present the Soft-Bubble gripper system with a highly compliant gripping surface and dense-geometry visuotactile sensing, capable of multiple kinds of tactile perception. We first present various mechanical design advances and a fabrication technique to deposit custom patterns to the internal surface of the sensor that enable tracking of shear-induced displacement of the manipuland. The depth maps output by the internal imaging sensor are used in an in-hand proximity pose estimation framework -- the method better captures distances to corners or edges on the manipuland geometry. We also extend our previous work on tactile classification and integrate the system within a robust manipulation pipeline for cluttered home environments. The capabilities of the proposed system are demonstrated through robust execution multiple real-world manipulation tasks. A video of the system in action can be found here: [https://youtu.be/G_wBsbQyBfc].