ICRA 2021 ViTac Workshop: Trends and Challenges in Visuo-Tactile Perception

Abstract: This is the 3rd time for us to organise the ViTac workshop in the ICRA conferences and will be a milestone after two consecutive ViTac workshops. This workshop aims to put the visuo-tactile perception under the spotlight by investigating the current trends and providing guidance towards possible future directions in the field. Humans couple vision and touch tightly in daily tasks like grasping and manipulation. Similarly, multimodal perception also plays a key role for robots to execute tasks in unstructured environments. In recent decades, there has been much advancement in integrating vision and tactile sensing for robots, both in hardware and software. In the ICRA 2019 ViTac workshop, we highlighted the recent development of optical tactile sensors by integrating visual cameras in tactile sensors for multimodal and cross-modal perception. In the ICRA 2020 ViTac workshop, we drew attention to how vision and tactile sensing together contribute to closing the perception-action loop. This proposed full-day workshop will encompass recent progress in the area of visuo-tactile perception, particularly the trends both in the hardware and algorithms. It will further enhance active collaboration and address challenges for this important topic and applications.

Organisers:
Shan Luo, King’s College London
Nathan Lepora, University of Bristol
Wenzhen Yuan, Carnegie Mellon University
Kaspar Althoefer, Queen Mary University of London
Gordon Cheng, Technische Universität München

Invited speakers:
● Roberta L. Klatzky, CMU
● Aude Billard, EPFL
● Edward Adelson, MIT
● Lorenzo Jamone, Queen Mary University of London
● Matei Ciocarlie, Columbia University
● Harold Soh, National University of Singapore
● Roberto Calandra, Meta
● Qiang Li, Bielefeld University

Accepted papers

  1. S. Funabashi, G. Yang, F. Hongyi, A. Schmitz, L. Jamone, T. Ogata and S. Sugano. "Visualization of Tactile Features for Object Recognition with a Multi-Fingered Hand"
  2. Sunny Katyara, Fanny Ficuciello, Tao Teng, Fei Chen, Bruno Siciliano, Darwin G. Caldwell, "Intuitive Tasks Planning Using Visuo-Tactile Perception for Human Robot Cooperation"
  3. Francesca Palermo, Changjae Oh, Kaspar Althoefer, Stefan Poslad, Ildar Farkhatdinov, "Investigation of images of cracks via graph theory for developing an optimal exploration algorithm for a robotic manipulator"
  4. Jiaqi Jiang, Guanqun Cao, Daniel Fernandes Gomes and Shan Luo. "Rapid Crack Reconstruction Using Tactile Sensing and Vision"
  5. Stephen J. Redmond, Benjamin Xia, and Heba Khamis. "Real-time Friction Estimation for Grip Force Control"
  6. Arkadeep Narayan Chaudhury, Timothy Man, Wenzhen Yuan, Christopher Atkeson. "Using collocated vision to improve tactile sensing"

We thank the support from the following IEEE RAS Technical Committees: