用关节扭矩代理替代隐式力信号,提升机器人抓取的触觉感知能力
Beyond Implicit Force: Evaluating Explicit Force-Torque Proxies in Action Chunking with Transformers

- 用关节扭矩预测替代指令追踪误差,消除隐式力信号依赖
- 四类真实任务中,无隐式信号时政策失效,加扭矩后性能显著恢复
- 电机电流可作有效力矩代理,无需额外传感器,适合工业部署
接触丰富的操作需要从视觉和运动学信号中推断交互状态,这些信号通常观测性较弱。基于Transformer的动作分块(ACT)在精细操作中表现优异,但多数演示通过主从遥操作采集,命令与执行轨迹间的跟踪误差隐式编码了接触、阻力和约束违反信息。本文探究ACT的力感知是否依赖此隐藏线索。我们提出一种以观测为中心的ACT变体,预测未来执行器关节状态而非主端指令,从而移除遥操作带来的差异信号,同时保留其余学习流程。接着评估仅依赖机载电机电流或关节努力计算的简单扭矩代理,能否在无外部力/力矩传感器情况下恢复接触感知行为。在四个真实任务(表面跟随、插入、刚度区分、基于力的停止)中,移除隐式线索导致力关键阶段严重失败;而加入扭矩增强的策略则恢复了鲁棒接触行为,并优于基础ACT。结果表明,在真实硬件上,隐式遥操作信号是可被替代的力感知来源,当扭矩信号可用时,简单代理可匹配、超越甚至进一步提升其性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Contact-rich manipulation requires policies to infer interaction state from signals that are often weakly observable through vision and kinematics alone. Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT) has shown strong performance in fine-grained manipulation, but many deployments collect demonstrations through leader-follower teleoperation, where tracking error between commanded leader motion and executed follower motion implicitly encodes contact, resistance, and constraint violation. This paper examines whether ACT's apparent force-awareness depends on this hidden interaction cue. We introduce an observation-centric ACT variant that predicts future follower joint states instead of leader commands, thereby removing the teleoperation-induced discrepancy signal while preserving the rest of the learning pipeline. We then evaluate whether simple joint-torque proxies, derived from onboard motor current or joint effort, can recover contact-aware behavior without external force/torque sensors. Across four real-world tasks spanning surface following, insertion, stiffness discrimination, and force-based stopping, removing the implicit cue leads to severe failures in force-critical phases. In contrast, torque-augmented policies recover robust contact behavior and improve the base ACT policy. These results demonstrate that, on real hardware, the implicit teleoperation cue is a recoverable source of force-awareness, where torque signals are available, a simple proxy matches, surpasses, or further enhances it.
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