Tactile simulators gain texture detail for better robot touch sensing
Norm2Tex: Augmenting Visuo-Tactile Simulations with Texture
Robotics
Summary
Robots learn by touching things, but making realistic touch data is hard and slow. The authors created Norm2Tex, a tool that adds tiny surface textures into touch simulations to make them closer to real life. This helps robots recognize different materials better and make smarter decisions when handling objects. Their tests show that robots trained with Norm2Tex do better at feeling textures and behave more naturally with real objects.
What this means in practice
- •For robotics engineers: Improve robot control by training policies with simulated tactile data enriched with realistic texture details.
- •For robotic process automation teams: Enhance material recognition for robots in manufacturing by integrating textured tactile simulation into training workflows.
Authors
Seongjin Bien, Débora Oliveira Makowski, Roberto Calandra, Florian Walter, Wolfram Burgard
Abstract
Large-scale datasets are essential for training generalist robot control policies. Collecting real-world tactile data is costly and time-consuming, motivating the use of tactile simulations. However, current tactile simulators capture only overall contact geometry and miss fine details like texture. This results in a significant domain shift between simulated and real tactile data. To address this gap, we introduce Norm2Tex, a plug-in method that augments simulations of vision-based tactile sensors with high-frequency surface details from normal map textures. By modifying the target object's depth map before a tactile simulator's rendering pipeline, Norm2Tex seamlessly integrates into different tactile simulators. We also evaluate sim-to-real transfer using material classification and a reinforcement learning task. Our results show that Norm2Tex preserves material-dependent tactile information across domains, improving texture recognition and producing material-dependent control behavior in the real world.