Thrilled to present Neural Contact Fields (NCF), a method that brings together and tactile sensing to address the problem of tracking extrinsic contact between object and environment. 1/6
github.com/carolinahiguer
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Although localizing external contacts can provide rich information to respond to downstream tasks, this problem has received little attention.
NCF is the first method to track arbitrary multi-modal extrinsic contacts without making assumptions about the contact type. 2/6
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Our key insight is to estimate the probability of contact for any 3D point in the latent space of object’s shapes, given vision-based tactile inputs that sense the local motion resulting from the external contact. 3/6
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In simulation experiments, we find that NCF is able to localize multiple contact patches without making any assumptions about the geometry of the contact, and capture contact/no-contact transitions for known categories of objects with unseen shapes in unseen environments. 4/6
GIF
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In addition to Neural Contact Fields, we also release our YCB-Extrinsic-Contact dataset of simulated extrinsic contact interactions to enable further research in this area. 5/6
Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2210.09297
Code: github.com/carolinahiguer
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