Stanford Seminar - Adaptable Robotic Manipulation Using Tactile Sensors

Tae Myung Huh of UC Santa Cruz October 28, 2022 Despite some successful demonstrations, bringing robots into our everyday lives still remains a challenge. One of the major hurdles is the sensing of contact conditions. Contact conditions profoundly affect how the robot’s actions will affect interaction forces between it and its objects, surfaces, or even other agents that it comes into contact with. Part of the motivation to monitor these interactions and how they change is that they are not entirely predictable; contact conditions and forces can change continuously or discontinuously over the course of a task. To react adequately to these kinds of changes, the robot needs tactile sensors. These tactile sensors provide unique contact information, such as contact force, location, and slips, which enables adaptive robotic control in changing contact conditions. In this talk, I mainly present two tactile sensing studies on dexterous manipulation and suction cup grasping. The first concerns tactile sensing with friction-based contacts for sliding manipulation. I will present a multimodal tactile sensor that measures local normal/shear stress as well as directional (linear and rotational) slips. This information is useful for in-hand object manipulations. The second concerns tactile sensing for suction cup grasping. The smart suction cup monitors local suction seal formations and enables haptic exploration and grip monitoring during grasping and forceful manipulation. About the speaker: Tae Myung Huh received his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering in 2014 from Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering in 2016 and 2020 from Stanford University, Stanford, CA. His research interests include robotic tactile sensors, perception of grasping, and machine learning. In his Ph.D. study, he developed a small legged robot with capacitive force sensors on its feet, tactile sensors for measuring contact of gec