Detecting and localizing contacts is essential for robot manipulators to perform contact-rich tasks in unstructured environments. While robot skins can localize contacts on the surface of robot arms, these sensors are not yet robust or easily accessible. As such, prior works have explored using proprioceptive observations, such as joint velocities and torques, to perform contact localization. Many past approaches assume the robot is static during contact incident, a single contact is made at a time, or having access to accurate dynamics models and joint torque sensing. In this work, we relax these assumptions and propose using Domain Randomization to train a neural network to localize contacts of robot arms in motion without joint torque observations. Our method uses a novel cylindrical projection encoding of the robot arm surface, which allows the network to use convolution layers to process input features and transposed convolution layers to predict contacts. The trained network achieves a contact detection accuracy of 91.5% and a mean contact localization error of 3.0cm. We further demonstrate an application of the contact localization model in an obstacle mapping task, evaluated in both simulation and the real world.
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Contact Localization via Active Oscillatory Actuation
Many robotic tasks rely on physical interactions with the task environment. Sensing when and where links make physical contacts can be crucial in several applications, including but not limited to grasping, locomotion, collaborative robotics and navigation. While sensorizing robot end effectors with intrinsic tactile devices is a logical approach, current and accessible options are often expensive or require invasive modifications. This paper presents a prototype method of both sensing and localizing contacts along a rigid link that can be readily incorporated into existing machines. The mechanism is lightweight and low-cost, and functions by actively providing an oscillatory mechanical actuation signal to a rigid link, whose mechanical response is measured with an inertial device and is used to localize touch at one of five designated contact points. Classification is performed with supervised methods using transient behavior and spectral features. Evaluation is conducted with five-fold cross validation, and preliminary results indicate promising performance in localizing the point of contact on the rigid link with accuracy of over 97%.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2101107
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10326945
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration (SII)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 344 to 350
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/SII52469.2022.9708753
