Papers › Deep Visuo-Tactile Learning: Estimation of Tactile Properties from Images

Deep Visuo-Tactile Learning: Estimation of Tactile Properties from Images

9 Mar 2018arXiv:1803.03435links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Kuniyuki Takahashi, Jethro Tan

The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.

Estimation of tactile properties from vision, such as slipperiness or roughness, is important to effectively interact with the environment. These tactile properties help us decide which actions we should choose and how to perform them. E.g., we can drive slower if we see that we have bad traction or grasp tighter if an item looks slippery. We believe that this ability also helps robots to enhance their understanding of the environment, and thus enables them to tailor their actions to the situation at hand. We therefore propose a model to estimate the degree of tactile properties from visual perception alone (e.g., the level of slipperiness or roughness). Our method extends a encoder-decoder network, in which the latent variables are visual and tactile features. In contrast to previous works, our method does not require manual labeling, but only RGB images and the corresponding tactile sensor data. All our data is collected with a webcam and uSkin tactile sensor mounted on the end-effector of a Sawyer robot, which strokes the surfaces of 25 different materials. We show that our model generalizes to materials not included in the training data by evaluating the feature space, indicating that it has learned to associate important tactile properties with images.

PaperPDFCode

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

PFN-VT

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections