Visual Pressure Estimation and Control for Soft Robotic Grippers

Patrick Grady, Jeremy A. Collins, Samarth Brahmbhatt, Christopher D. Twigg, Chengcheng Tang, James Hays, Charles C. Kemp

Soft robotic grippers facilitate contact-rich manipulation, including robust grasping of varied objects. Yet the beneficial compliance of a soft gripper also results in significant deformation that can make precision manipulation challenging. We present visual pressure estimation & control (VPEC), a method that uses a single RGB image of an unmodified soft gripper from an external camera to directly infer pressure applied to the world by the gripper. We present inference results for a pneumatic gripper and a tendon-actuated gripper making contact with a flat surface. We also show that VPEC enables precision manipulation via closed-loop control of inferred pressure. We present results for a mobile manipulator (Stretch RE1 from Hello Robot) using visual servoing to do the following: achieve target pressures when making contact; follow a spatial pressure trajectory; and grasp small objects, including a microSD card, a washer, a penny, and a pill. Overall, our results show that VPEC enables grippers with high compliance to perform precision manipulation.

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