Touch2Trace: Tactile-Driven Imitation Learning for Dexterous Cable Tracing

2026-09-14

AI Summary

研究通过触觉驱动的模仿学习方法Touch2Trace解决灵活操控可变形物体的问题，特别是电缆追踪任务，显著提高了操作性能。

Abstract

Dexterous manipulation of deformable objects demands continuous fingertip-level regulation of pressure, friction, and incipient slip. We study one of the most challenging cases: dexterous cable tracing, feeding a cable through the hand with repeated pinch-and-curl motions of the thumb and index finger. We introduce Touch2Trace, a tactile-driven imitation-learning system for this task, and provide, to our knowledge, the first systematic real-world characterization of how encoder pretraining, control rate, temporal context, and spatial resolution each shape policy performance. The winning learning recipe combines a tactile encoder pretrained for a custom 32 x 32 piezoresistive sensor (TacV5) via self-supervised learning with a lightweight transformer policy trained on teleoperated demonstrations via behavior cloning, deployed at 60 Hz on a Tesollo DG-5F hand. Tactile feedback without vision or explicit cable-state estimation significantly improves tracing performance versus a proprioception-only baseline: from 0.2 cm to 20.1 cm mean distance and 0% to 93% success rate, with zero-shot transfer to unseen cables and routing conditions. The results quantify the influence of key parameters in tactile-driven systems for reliable dexterous deformable object manipulation.

Problem

• Dexterous Cable Tracing
• Tactile-Driven Imitation Learning
• Deformable Objects

Innovation

• tactile-driven imitation learning
• self-supervised learning
• transformer policy
• dexterous cable tracing
• TacV5 sensor