TactSpace: Learning a Physics-enriched Shared Latent Space for Tactile Sim-to-Real Transfer
arXiv:2606.18959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile sensing provides direct measurements of contact interactions that are essential for robotic manipulation. However, current simulators lack the fidelity to faithfully model the complex deformation and transduction mechanics of tactile sensors, severely hindering sim-to-real transfer in robot learning pipelines. To address this challenge, we propose a multi-modal representation learning framework that aligns heterogeneous tactile modalities
Overview
arXiv:2606.18959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile sensing provides direct measurements of contact interactions that are essential for robotic manipulation. However, current simulators lack the fidelity to faithfully model the complex deformation and transduction mechanics of tactile sensors, severely hindering sim-to-real transfer in robot learning pipelines. To address this challenge, we propose a multi-modal representation learning framework that aligns heterogeneous tactile modalities within a shared latent space, eliminating the need for accurate raw-signal simulation while preserving relevant contact information. Our approach employs modality-specific encoders to project diverse tactile observations, such as simulated penetration depth and real-world capacitance, into a common embedding space. The model is trained using self- and cross-reconstruction objectives alongside contrastive alignment, encouraging modality-invariant yet information-rich representations. We evaluate the learned embeddings on indenter shape identification, force prediction, and geometric reconstruction tasks, training exclusively in simulation and testing directly on real sensor measurements. Our results demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer across physically dissimilar representations. Furthermore, incorporating multi-physics simulation modalities yields more informative embeddings that transfer across diverse downstream tasks, demonstrating a 16.7% reduction in force prediction error and a 45.8% reduction in shape reconstruction error. Finally, we release an efficient Warp-based implementation of a penalty-based tactile simulation model for Isaac Lab, enabling scalable tactile data generation.
Source
Originally published at arxiv.org.
Related Articles
- Self-Supervised Mask-Aware Transformers for Fault-Tolerant FBG Force Sensing in Minimally Invasive Surgical Robotics
- EffiNav: Fusing Depth and Vision-Language for Efficient Object Goal Navigation
- A Scalable Embodied Intelligence Platform for Seamless Real-to-Sim-to-Real Transfer of Household Mobile Manipulation Tasks
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18959
