Towards Unknown Objects Manipulation

We propose a simple but efficient control strategy to manipulate objects of unknown shape, weight, and friction properties – prerequisites which are necessary for classical offline grasping and manipulation methods. Instead, the proposed control strategy employs estimated contact point locations, which can be obtained from modern tactile sensors with good spatial resolution. The feasibility of the strategy is proven in simulation experiments employing a physics engine providing exact contact information. However, to motivate the applicability in real world scenarios, where only coarse and noisy contact information will be available, we also evaluated the performance of the approach when adding artificial noise.