Video

Team BlindGrasp - IISc & MIT, India & USA

Humans can often easily explore closed spaces with their hands and pick up objects without even looking. The application by the international team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Science and the U.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology aims to bring such capabilities to robots. The goal is for robots to explore, recognize and pick up objects in vision-denied environments using the sense of touch. To this end, the BlindGrasp team is designing a novel gripper with tactile sensing capabilities that gathers the contact and proximity information. This data, coupled with the force-sensing capabilities of KUKA’s lightweight robot LBR iiwa, is used by a machine learning agent to learn motion policies and thus safely explore the environment and pick up objects.

Team contact: Achu Wilson