Bayesian State Estimation via Contact Sensing
We investigate the problem of using contact sensors to estimate the configuration of the environment during manipulation. Contact sensors are unique because they inherently discriminate between “contact” and “no-contact” configurations. As a result, the set of object configurations that activates a sensor constitutes a lower-dimensional contact manifold in the configuration space of the environment. This causes conventional state estimation methods, such as the particle filter, to perform poorly during periods of contact due to particle deprivation.
Our work introduces the manifold particle filter as a principled way of solving the state estimation problem when the state moves between multiple manifolds of different dimensionality. The manifold particle filter avoids particle starvation during contact by adaptively sampling particles that reside on the contact manifold from the dual proposal distribution.
Approaches
Explicit Representations
For low-dimensional problems, we demonstrate several techniques of sampling from the dual proposal distribution by constructing an approximate representation of the contact manifold.
Implicit Representations
For high-dimensional problems, we implicitly represent the contact manifold as the iso-contour of a loss function and use constraint projection to sample from dual proposal distribution.
Our simulation results show that that the manifold particle filter outperforms the conventional particle filter in both speed and accuracy on two applications: (1) estimating the pose of a movable object relative to the hand during planar pushing and (2) estimating the configuration of a manipulator in a known environment. We additionally demonstrate the approach in real-robot experiments using feedback from tactile sensors on the BarrettHand and the iHY end-effector.
Publications
koval_thesis.pdfMichael C. Koval. Robust Manipulation via Contact Sensing. PhD thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, 2016
koval_2015_ijrr.pdfM.C. Koval, N.S. Pollard, and S.S. Srinivasa. Pose estimation for planar contact manipulation with manifold particle filters. IJRR, 34(7):922–945, 2015.
koval_2017_icra.pdfM.C.. Koval, M. Klingensmith, S.S. Srinivasa, N.S. Pollard, and M. Kaess. The manifold particle filter for state estimation on high-dimensional implicit manifolds. In IEEE ICRA, 2017.