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In house tactile sensor prototype. Detects taps, motion, and multiple contact with force magnitudes. Built to be cheap, robust, and replaceable. Not in our demos yet, still WIP. We pair simple tactile sensing with torque transparent joints to recover rich contact without expensive sensors.

38,930 views • 4 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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I was really impressed by the UMI gripper (Cheng Chi et al.), but a key limitation is that **force-related data wasn’t captured**: humans feel haptic feedback through the mechanical springs, but the robot couldn’t leverage that info, limiting the data’s value for fine-grained manipulation tasks. Led by my amazing students Yolanda Zhu and Binghao Huang, we designed a **portable visuo-tactile gripper** by integrating our dense, flexible tactile arrays with the UMI gripper to enable large-scale in-the-wild data collection. 🔗 We demonstrate **cross-modal representation learning** and **downstream policy learning** on tasks requiring in-hand state estimation (e.g., test tube reorientation) and fine-grained force sensing (e.g., pipette fluid transfer). Key takeaways: - Our flexible tactile arrays store the rich haptic information humans perceive as dense tactile signals. - Portability and robustness are key for in-the-wild data collection; our portable gripper is compact, lightweight, and durable. - Touch provides precise, robust measurements of in-hand object pose, invariant to lighting and viewpoint. - Cross-modal pretraining on large-scale in-the-wild data significantly improves policy robustness and sample efficiency (as shown many times before — and verified again here!). Also check out our previous investigations of dense, flexible tactile grids for understanding human-robot-environment interactions: - Dense tactile glove (Nature ’19): - 3D-ViTac (CoRL ’24):

Yunzhu Li

13,188 views • 1 year ago

Force-sensing fingers! 🧤 Stanford researchers just released UMI-FT, a handheld data collection platform that puts compact six-axis force/torque sensors on each finger, enabling finger-level wrench measurements alongside RGB, depth, and pose data. Many manipulation tasks require careful force modulation: too little force and the task fails, too much and you cause damage. But commercial force/torque sensors are expensive, bulky, and fragile, which has limited large-scale force-aware policy learning. UMI-FT changes the economics. The platform uses an iPhone for RGB vision, ultrawide RGB, depth, and pose via ARKit, with each finger sensorized using a CoinFT sensor to capture per-finger wrench information during manipulation. This multimodal data trains an adaptive compliance policy that predicts position targets, grasp force, and stiffness for execution on standard compliance controllers. The learned policy runs slowest and generates reference targets, while model-based compliance and force controllers provide delicate 6D compliance control and real-time force modulation. They tested on three contact-rich, force-sensitive tasks: whiteboard wiping (locate eraser, grasp, wipe until clean), skewering zucchini (grasp slice firmly, push onto stick until punctured), and lightbulb insertion (grasp bulb, align bayonet pin with socket slit, insert while overcoming spring force, rotate to light up). The results are clear. Policies without compliance struggle to modulate contact force and trigger safety faults from excessive force. Policies without force sensing fail to grasp unseen objects or resist reaction forces, causing slippage. Here's the project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

12,822 views • 6 months ago