Pre-touch sensing for sequential manipulation

Abstract

The primary focus of this work is to examine how robots can achieve more robust sequential manipulation through the use of pre-touch sensors. The utility of close-range proximity sensing is evaluated through a robotic system that uses a new optical time-of-flight pre-touch sensor to complete a highly precise and sequential task - solving the Rubik's cube. The techniques used in this task are then extended to a more general framework in which ICP is used to match pre-touch data to a reference model, demonstrating that even simple pre-touch scans can be used to recover the pose of common objects that require sequential manipulation.