Meet the SwingBot: a clever robot that learns how stably handle objects by tilting and shaking them. The robot learns physical features of its item through tactile exploration. It can predict the swing angle of new objects. As the researchers explain:
Two exploration actions (tilting and shaking) provide the tactile information used to create a physical feature embedding space. With this embedding, SwingBot is able to predict the swing angle achieved by a robot performing dynamic swing-up manipulations on a previously unseen object. Using these predictions, it is able to search for the optimal control parameters for a desired swing- up angle.
This robot doesn’t have cameras or any vision system. Its grippers have GelSight tactile sensor to measure force distribution.
[HT]
