Speaker: Yipai Du, Co-Founder and Tactile Sensing Specialist, Daimon Robotics

Title: Vision-based Tactile Sensing and Applications

Date and Time: Wednesday, May 28, 11:00 AM CT

Location: Tech, B211 and Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/CRBSeminar

Abstract: Tactile sensing capability is indispensable for animals and humans to interact with the physical world with flexibility and agility. Vision-based tactile sensing have shown great potential to obtain rich information during dexterous manipulation. We focus on reducing the design complexity and increasing the scalability of vision-based tactile sensing. The camera captures deformations of a specially designed pattern. We propose to use the Gaussian density feature to infer contact depth from this 2D deformation. We demonstrate the practical efficacy of this tactile sensing method by deploying it in different robotic actuators like robotic feet and arms. We show case properly exploiting the tactile data can reduce complexity, improve sample efficiency, and achieve robustness in a deformable cloth manipulation setting, which is prone to visual occlusion and observability issues.

Bio: Dr. Yipai Du obtained PhD from the Robotics Institute of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, under the supervision of Prof. Michael Yu Wang. During his PhD, he studied vision-based sensor design, robotic tactile perception and its applications in manipulation. He also used to work at ETH Zurich and Purdue University on vision-based tactile sensing. He is now one of the co-founders of Daimon Robotics and leads the tactile sensing team there.

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