Tac2Pose: Tactile Object Pose Estimation from the First Touch

Understand

In this paper, we present Tac2Pose, an object-specific approach to tactile pose estimation from the first touch for known objects.

• Given the object geometry, we learn a tailored perception model in simulation that estimates a probability distribution over possible object poses given a tactile observation.
• To do so, we simulate the contact shapes that a dense set of object poses would produce on the sensor.
• Then, given a new contact shape obtained from the sensor, we match it against the pre-computed set using an object-specific embedding learned using contrastive learning.