EyeSight Hand: Design of a Fully-Actuated Dexterous Robot Hand with Integrated Vision-Based Tactile Sensors and Compliant Actuation
Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: In this work, we introduce the EyeSight Hand, a 7 degrees of freedom (DoF) humanoid hand featuring integrated vision-based tactile sensors tailored for enhanced whole-hand manipulation. Additionally, we introduce an actuation scheme centered around quasi-direct drive actuation to achieve human-like strength and speed while ensuring robustness for large-scale data collection. We evaluate the EyeSight Hand on three challenging tasks: bottle opening, plasticine cutting, and plate pick and place, which require a blend of complex manipulation, tool use, and precise force application. Imitation learning models trained on these tasks, with a vision dropout strategy, showcase the benefits of tactile feedback in enhancing task success rates. Our results reveal that the integration of tactile sensing dramatically improves task performance, underscoring the critical role of tactile information in dexterous manipulation.
Authors: Branden Romero, Hao-Shu Fang, Pulkit Agrawal, Edward Adelson
Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Control and Systems Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Toyota Research Institute
OpenAlex ID: W4405785186