Grasping in the Dark: Zero-Shot Object Grasping Using Tactile Feedback

Grasping and manipulating a wide variety of objects is a fundamental skill that would determine the success and wide spread adaptation of robots in homes. Several end-effector designs for robust manipulation have been proposed but they mostly work when provided with prior information about the objects or equipped with external sensors for estimating object shape or size. Such approaches are limited to many-shot or unknown objects and are prone to estimation errors from external estimation systems. We propose an approach to grasp and manipulate previously unseen or zero-shot objects: the objects without any prior of their shape, size, material and weight properties, using only feedback from tactile sensors which is contrary to the state-of-the-art. Such an approach provides robust manipulation of objects either when the object model is not known or when it is estimated incorrectly from an external system. Our approach is inspired by the ideology of how animals or humans manipulate objects, i.e., by using feedback from their skin. Our grasping and manipulation revolves around the simple notion that objects slip if not grasped stably. This slippage can be detected and counteracted for a robust grasp that is agnostic to the type, shape, size, material and weight of the object. At the crux of our approach is a novel tactile feedback based controller that detects and compensates for slip during grasp. We successfully evaluate and demonstrate our proposed approach on many real world experiments using the Shadow Dexterous Hand equipped with BioTac SP tactile sensors for different object shapes, sizes, weights and materials. We obtain an overall success rate of 73.5%