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 tactile-based learning


Crossing the Reality Gap in Tactile-Based Learning

Tsai, Ya-Yen, Huang, Bidan, Zheng, Yu, Han, Lei, Lee, Wang Wei, Johns, Edward

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Tactile sensors are believed to be essential in robotic manipulation, and prior works often rely on experts to reason the sensor feedback and design a controller. With the recent advancement in data-driven approaches, complicated manipulation can be realised, but an accurate and efficient tactile simulation is necessary for policy training. To this end, we present an approach to model a commonly used pressure sensor array in simulation and to train a tactile-based manipulation policy with sim-to-real transfer in mind. Each taxel in our model is represented as a mass-spring-damper system, in which the parameters are iteratively identified as plausible ranges. This allows a policy to be trained with domain randomisation which improves its robustness to different environments. Then, we introduce encoders to further align the critical tactile features in a latent space. Finally, our experiments answer questions on tactile-based manipulation, tactile modelling and sim-to-real performance.