Grasping and Manipulation of Unknown Objects Based on Visual and Tactile Feedback

The sense of touch allows humans and higher animals to perform coordinated and efficient interactions within their environment. Recently, tactile sensor arrays providing high force, spatial, and temporal resolution became available for robotics, which allows us to consider new control strategies to exploit this important and valuable sensory channel for grasping and manipulation tasks. Successful dexterous manipulation strongly depends on tight feedback loops integrating proprioceptive, visual, and tactile feedback. We introduce a framework for tactile servoing that can realize specific tactile interaction patterns, for example to establish andmaintain contact (grasping) or to explore and manipulate objects. We demonstrate and evaluate the capabilities of the proposed control framework in a series of preliminary experiments employing a 16 × 16 tactile sensor array attached to a Kuka LWR arm as a large fingertip.