Improving robot manipulation through fingertip perception

Better sensing is crucial to improve robotic grasping and manipulation. Most robots currently have very limited perception in their manipulators, typically only fingertip position and velocity. Additional sensors make richer interactions with the objects possible. In this paper, we present a versatile, robust and low cost sensor for robot fingertips, that can improve robotic grasping and manipulation in several ways: 3D reconstruction of the shape of objects, material surface classification, and object slip detection. We extended TUM-Rosie, our robot for mobile manipulation, with fingertip sensors on its humanoid robotic hand, and show the advantages of the fingertip sensor integrated in our robot system.