2023/09/28 by Carolina Higuera, Higuera, Carolina, Joseph D. Ortiz +9 · 2 citations
Engineering · Neuroscience · #EEG and Brain-Computer Interfaces #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Robot Manipulation and Learning #Robotics (cs.RO) #Tactile and Sensory Interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2309.16652
openalex publication_date 2023/09/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Robotic manipulation tasks such as object insertion typically involve interactions between object and environment, namely extrinsic contacts. Prior work on Neural Contact Fields (NCF) use intrinsic tactile sensing between gripper and object to estimate extrinsic contacts in simulation. However, its effectiveness and utility in real-world tasks remains unknown. In this work, we improve NCF to enable sim-to-real transfer and use it to train policies for mug-in-cupholder and bowl-in-dishrack insertion tasks. We find our model NCF-v2, is capable of estimating extrinsic contacts in the real-world. Furthermore, our insertion policy with NCF-v2 outperforms policies without it, achieving 33% higher success and 1.36x faster execution on mug-in-cupholder, and 13% higher success and 1.27x faster execution on bowl-in-dishrack.