Learn from Incomplete Tactile Data: Tactile Representation Learning with Masked Autoencoders



Cao, Guanqun, Jiang, Jiaqi, Bollegala, Danushka ORCID: 0000-0003-4476-7003 and Luo, Shan
(2023) Learn from Incomplete Tactile Data: Tactile Representation Learning with Masked Autoencoders. In: 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023-10-1 - 2023-10-5, Detroid, USA.

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Abstract

The missing signal caused by the objects being occluded or an unstable sensor is a common challenge during data collection. Such missing signals will adversely affect the results obtained from the data, and this issue is observed more frequently in robotic tactile perception. In tactile perception, due to the limited working space and the dynamic environment, the contact between the tactile sensor and the object is frequently insufficient and unstable, which causes the partial loss of signals, thus leading to incomplete tactile data. The tactile data will therefore contain fewer tactile cues with low information density. In this paper, we propose a tactile representation learning method, named TacMAE, based on Masked Autoencoder to address the problem of incomplete tactile data in tactile perception. In our framework, a portion of the tactile image is masked out to simulate the missing contact regions. By reconstructing the missing signals in the tactile image, the trained model can achieve a high-level understanding of surface geometry and tactile properties from limited tactile cues. The experimental results of tactile texture recognition show that TacMAE can achieve a high recognition accuracy of 71.4% in the zero-shot transfer and 85.8% after fine-tuning, which are 15.2% and 8.2% higher than the results without using masked modeling. The extensive experiments on YCB objects demonstrate the knowledge transferability of our proposed method and the potential to improve efficiency in tactile exploration.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Unspecified)
Uncontrolled Keywords: Behavioral and Social Science, Neurosciences
Divisions: Faculty of Science and Engineering > School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 26 Jul 2023 12:52
Last Modified: 14 Mar 2024 22:24
DOI: 10.1109/iros55552.2023.10341788
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3171921