Vision and touch are two of the important sensing modalities for humans and they offer complementary information for sensing the environment. Robots could also benefit from such multi-modal sensing ability. In this paper, addressing for the first time (to the best of our knowledge) texture recognition from tactile images and vision, we propose a new fusion method named Deep Maximum Covariance Analysis (DMCA) to learn a joint latent space for sharing features through vision and tactile sensing. The features of camera images and tactile data acquired from a GelSight sensor are learned by deep neural networks. But the learned features are of a high dimensionality and are redundant due to the differences between the two sensing modalities, which deteriorates the perception performance. To address this, the learned features are paired using maximum covariance analysis. Results of the algorithm on a newly collected dataset of paired visual and tactile data relating to cloth textures show that a good recognition performance of greater than 90\% can be achieved by using the proposed DMCA framework. In addition, we find that the perception performance of either vision or tactile sensing can be improved by employing the shared representation space, compared to learning from unimodal data.
ViTacGen: Robotic Pushing with Vision-to-Touch Generation
Department of Engineering, King’s College London（工程系，伦敦国王学院）；Department of Engineering Mathematics and Bristol, Robotics Laboratory, University of Bristol（工程数学系及布里斯托尔机器人实验室，布里斯托尔大学）
ViTac-Tracing: Visual-Tactile Imitation Learning of Deformable Object Tracing
Robot Perception Laboratory, Department of Engineering, King’s College London（机器人感知实验室，工程系，伦敦国王学院）；Personal Robotics Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London（个人机器人实验室，电子与电气工程系，伦敦帝国学院）
Self-Supervised Visuo-Tactile Pretraining to Locate and Follow Garment Features
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；TU Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学）；The Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI)（人在环触觉互联网中心（CeTI））；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
What Matters for Active Texture Recognition With Vision-Based Tactile Sensors
TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；German Research Center for AI (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）；University of Giessen（吉森大学）；Centre for Cognitive Science, Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学认知科学中心）；Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence (Hessian.AI)（黑森人工智能中心）
