UW+Amazon Science Hub Faculty Research Award

Our project on “Adaptive Grasping and Object Manipulation using Visual and Tactile Feedback” was selected in the inaugural set of faculty research awards to advance AI and robotics. The UW + Amazon Science Hub was founded in February 2022 and housed in the University of Washington College of Engineering. The projects were selected through a joint review process between the UW Advisory Group and Amazon. Each recipient will each receive up to $100,000 in research funding from Amazon, and each year-long project will address a real-world, cutting-edge challenge in AI or robotics.

Our project aims to enable industrial collaborative robots with the manipulation intelligence that humans employ to grasp and manipulate objects with heterogeneous feedback. Humans use a combination of visual and tactile sensing to grasp and manipulate objects. Previously, numerous studies have proposed purely visual or purely tactile feedback algorithms to grasp objects. With recent advances of perception, computation, and sensor fusion, this project will integrate visual and tactile feedback to grasp and manipulate objects. The geometry, material and loading of the objects will not be known a priori. The study will use a UR5e robot fitted with a 2D stereo camera and a parallel gripper with pressure sensors for experimental validation of grasping and manipulation algorithms.