Tactile-based Object Retrieval From Granular Media

We introduce GEOTACT, the first robotic system capable of grasping and retrieving objects of potentially unknown shapes buried in a granular environment. While important in many applications, ranging from mining and exploration to search and rescue, this type of interaction with granular media is difficult due to the uncertainty stemming from visual occlusion and noisy contact signals. To address these challenges, we use a learning method relying exclusively on touch feedback, trained end-to-end with simulated sensor noise. We show that our problem formulation leads to the natural emergence of learned pushing behaviors that the manipulator uses to reduce uncertainty and funnel the object to a stable grasp despite spurious and noisy tactile readings. We introduce a training curriculum that bootstraps learning in simulated granular environments, enabling zero-shot transfer to real hardware. Despite being trained only on seven objects with primitive shapes, our method is shown to successfully retrieve 35 different objects, including rigid, deformable, and articulated objects with complex shapes. Videos and additional information can be found at https://jxu.ai/geotact.