Preliminary results on grasping with vision and touch

This paper presents initial results in integrating touch with vision for delicate manipulation tasks. A generalizable framework of behavioral primitives for tactile and visual feedback control is proposed. Since vision provides position and shape information at a distance, while tactile provides small-scale geometric and force information, we focus on the complimentary roles of vision and touch. We demonstrate that visual feedback can perform the rough positioning needed for tactile sensor feedback, and that grasp force and object orientation can be sensed and controlled with tactile sensing. A force sensor based approach provides a comparison measure, and we observe that the use of tactile sensing results in a more gentle grasp.