# Placing by Touching: An empirical study on the importance of tactile sensing for precise object placing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.02054 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02054/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Evetac: An Event-based Optical Tactile Sensor for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01236/) (2023)
- [Learning Force Distribution Estimation for the GelSight Mini Optical Tactile Sensor Based on Finite Element Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03315/) (2024)
- [Towards Transferring Tactile-based Continuous Force Control Policies from Simulation to Robot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07245/) (2023)
- [Hybrid Residual Reinforcement Learning for Contact-Rich Robotic Book Insertion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19962/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work deals with a practical everyday problem: stable object placement on flat surfaces starting from unknown initial poses. Common object-placing approaches require either complete scene specifications or extrinsic sensor measurements, e.g., cameras, that occasionally suffer from occlusions. We propose a novel approach for stable object placing that combines tactile feedback and proprioceptive sensing. We devise a neural architecture that estimates a rotation matrix, resulting in a corrective gripper movement that aligns the object with the placing surface for the subsequent object manipulation. We compare models with different sensing modalities, such as force-torque and an external motion capture system, in real-world object placing tasks with different objects. The experimental evaluation of our placing policies with a set of unseen everyday objects reveals significant generalization of our proposed pipeline, suggesting that tactile sensing plays a vital role in the intrinsic understanding of robotic dexterous object manipulation. Code, models, and supplementary videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/placing-by-touching.