Physics-Informed Sliding-Window Particle Filtering for Tactile-Only In-Hand 6-DoF Object Pose Refinement

Abstract:This paper studies tactile-only 6-DoF pose refinement and belief maintenance for grasped objects in static and short quasi-static in-hand configurations where vision is unavailable or heavily occluded. The key difficulty is tactile partial observability: whole-hand taxel contacts are sparse, intermittent, and ambiguous under limited excitation and object symmetries. We propose a physics-informed particle filter on $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ that updates pose beliefs from dense whole-hand tactile measurements. The likelihood combines active-contact signed-distance consistency, force-normal alignment, friction-cone feasibility, zero-force negative evidence, and optional feasibility guards. A sliding-window log-likelihood fuses recent tactile frames to reduce single-frame ambiguity, while a potential-field-guided proposal steers particles away from hand--object penetration. Symmetry-aware resampling preserves multiple plausible modes. Experiments on an Allegro Hand V5 with five objects show lower normalized ADD-S than tactile-only geometric, particle-filter, and learning baselines, and ablations confirm the benefits of temporal fusion, potential guidance, and mode preservation.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2608.17601 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.17601v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.17601 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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