Simultaneous Contact Location and Object Pose Estimation Using Proprioception and Tactile Feedback

Abstract: Joint estimation of grasped object pose and extrinsic contacts is central to robust and dexterous manipulation. In this paper, we propose a novel state-estimation algorithm that jointly estimates contact location and object pose in 3D using exclusively proprioception and tactile feedback. Our approach leverages two complementary particle filters: one to estimate contact location (CPFGrasp) and another to estimate object poses (SCOPE). We implement and evaluate our approach on real-world single-arm and dual-arm robotic systems. We demonstrate that by bringing two objects into contact, the robots can infer contact location and object poses simultaneously. Our proposed method can be applied to a number of downstream tasks that require accurate pose estimates, such as tool use and assembly. Code and data can be found at https://github.com/MMintLab/scope.