UniTac: Whole-Robot Touch Sensing Without Tactile Sensors
Robots can better interact with humans and unstructured environments through touch sensing. However, most commercial robots are not equipped with tactile skins, making it challenging to achieve even basic touch-sensing functions, such as contact localization. We present UniTac, a data-driven whole-body touch-sensing approach that uses only proprioceptive joint sensors and does not require the installation of additional sensors. Our approach enables a robot equipped solely with joint sensors to localize contacts. Our goal is to democratize touch sensing and provide an off-the-shelf tool for HRI researchers to provide their robots with touch-sensing capabilities. We validate our approach on two platforms: the Franka robot arm and the Spot quadruped. On Franka, we can localize contact to within 8.0 centimeters, and on Spot, we can localize to within 7.2 centimeters at around 2,000 Hz on an RTX 3090 GPU without adding any additional sensors to the robot. Project website: https://ivl.cs.brown.edu/research/unitac.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
UniTacHand: Unified Spatio-Tactile Representation for Human to Robotic Hand Skill Transfer
Tactile sensing is crucial for robotic hands to achieve human-level dexterous manipulation, especially in scenarios with visual occlusion. However, its application is often hindered by the difficulty of collecting large-…
Contrastive LearningRotating without Seeing: Towards In-hand Dexterity through Touch
Tactile information plays a critical role in human dexterity. It reveals useful contact information that may not be inferred directly from vision. In fact, humans can even perform in-hand dexterous manipulation without u…
ObjectUniTac: A Unified Multimodal Model for Cross-Sensor Tactile Understanding and Generation
Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have shown great promise in integrating understanding and generation across diverse modalities. However, existing research rarely extends this paradigm to the tactile domain, where both o…
Learning Versatile Humanoid Manipulation with Touch Dreaming
Humanoid robots promise general-purpose assistance, yet real-world humanoid loco-manipulation remains challenging because it requires whole-body stability, end-effector dexterity, and contact-aware interaction under freq…
UniTAC: Universal Task-Aware Compression via Weighted Distortion Measures
Physical AI systems such as autonomous vehicles and robots rely on timely exchange of high-dimensional sensory signals under tight bandwidth, latency, and energy budgets. Because the task driving downstream decisions evo…
Autonomous Vehicles