Semi-Supervised Disentanglement of Tactile Contact Geometry from Sliding-Induced Shear
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The sense of touch is fundamental to human dexterity. When mimicked in robotic touch, particularly by use of soft optical tactile sensors, it suffers from distortion due to motion-dependent shear. This complicates tactile tasks like shape reconstruction and exploration that require information about contact geometry. In this work, we pursue a semi-supervised approach to remove shear while preserving contact-only information. We validate our approach by showing a match between the model-generated unsheared images with their counterparts from vertically tapping onto the object. The model-generated unsheared images give faithful reconstruction of contact-geometry otherwise masked by shear, along with robust estimation of object pose then used for sliding exploration and full reconstruction of several planar shapes. We show that our semi-supervised approach achieves comparable performance to its fully supervised counterpart across all validation tasks with an order of magnitude less supervision. The semi-supervised method is thus more computational and labeled sample-efficient. We expect it will have broad applicability to wide range of complex tactile exploration and manipulation tasks performed via a shear-sensitive sense of touch.
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