Haptic Perception Decision Making And Learning For Manipulation With Artificial Hands

Haptic Perception, Decision-making, and Learning for Manipulation with Artificial Hands

Robotic systems are outmatched by the abilities of the human hand to perceive and manipulate the world. Human hands are able to physically interact with the world to perceive, learn, and act to accomplish tasks. Limitations of robotic systems to interact with and manipulate the world diminish their usefulness. In order to advance robot end effectors, specifically artificial hands, rich multimodal tactile sensing is needed. In this work, a multi-articulating, anthropomorphic robot testbed was developed for investigating tactile sensory stimuli during finger-object interactions. The artificial finger is controlled by a tendon-driven remote actuation system that allows for modular control of any tendon-driven end effector and capabilities for both speed and strength. The artificial proprioception system enables direct measurement of joint angles and tendon tensions while temperature, vibration, and skin deformation are provided by a multimodal tactile sensor. Next, attention was focused on real-time artificial perception for decision-making. A robotic system needs to perceive its environment in order to make decisions. Specific actions such as "exploratory procedures" can be employed to classify and characterize object features. Prior work on offline perception was extended to develop an anytime predictive model that returns the probability of having touched a specific feature of an object based on minimally processed sensor data. Developing models for anytime classification of features facilitates real-time action-perception loops. Finally, by combining real-time action-perception with reinforcement learning, a policy was learned to complete a functional contour-following task: closing a deformable ziplock bag. The approach relies only on proprioceptive and localized tactile data. A Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit (C-MAB) reinforcement learning algorithm was implemented to maximize cumulative rewards within a finite time period by balancing exploration versus exploitation of the action space. Performance of the C-MAB learner was compared to a benchmark Q-learner that eventually returns the optimal policy. To assess robustness and generalizability, the learned policy was tested on variations of the original contour-following task. The work presented contributes to the full range of tools necessary to advance the abilities of artificial hands with respect to dexterity, perception, decision-making, and learning.

Tactile Sensing, Skill Learning, and Robotic Dexterous Manipulation

Tactile Sensing, Skill Learning and Robotic Dexterous Manipulation focuses on cross-disciplinary lines of research and groundbreaking research ideas in three research lines: tactile sensing, skill learning and dexterous control. The book introduces recent work about human dexterous skill representation and learning, along with discussions of tactile sensing and its applications on unknown objects' property recognition and reconstruction. Sections also introduce the adaptive control schema and its learning by imitation and exploration. Other chapters describe the fundamental part of relevant research, paying attention to the connection among different fields and showing the state-of-the-art in related branches. The book summarizes the different approaches and discusses the pros and cons of each. Chapters not only describe the research but also include basic knowledge that can help readers understand the proposed work, making it an excellent resource for researchers and professionals who work in the robotics industry, haptics and in machine learning. - Provides a review of tactile perception and the latest advances in the use of robotic dexterous manipulation - Presents the most detailed work on synthesizing intelligent tactile perception, skill learning and adaptive control - Introduces recent work on human's dexterous skill representation and learning and the adaptive control schema and its learning by imitation and exploration - Reveals and illustrates how robots can improve dexterity by modern tactile sensing, interactive perception, learning and adaptive control approaches

Insights in Neurorobotics: 2021