TacSpin: Tactile Tracking of In-Gripper Object Rotation on SO(3) via Axis-Magnitude Estimation

arXiv:2610.17574v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tracking object motion within a gripper provides essential feedback for robotic manipulation. However, limited contact coverage and uneven deformation make tactile estimation challenging. In this study, we present TacSpin, a method that tracks in-gripper object rotation on SO(3) using only two vision-based tactile sensors. The key idea is to estimate the axis and magnitude of the rotation response separately, rather than fitting a rigid-body model by least squares. Each finger's response is further refined with contact-boundary cues. The two fingers are then fused according to their agreement. On standard objects, TacSpin achieves lower mean checkpoint errors. Qualitative demonstrations on real-world objects, using calibration transferred from a standard sphere, illustrate tracking under different contact geometries.

Source: arXiv cs.RO | 2026-10-14