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Tactile Gesture Recognition with Built-in Joint Sensors for Industrial Robots

arXiv:2508.12435v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While gesture recognition using vision or robot skins is an active research area in Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC), this paper explores deep learning methods relying solely on a robot's built-in joint sensors, eliminating the need for external sensors. We evaluated various convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures and collected a dataset to study the impact of data representation and model architecture on the recognition accuracy. Our

Published June 30, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2508.12435v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While gesture recognition using vision or robot skins is an active research area in Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC), this paper explores deep learning methods relying solely on a robot's built-in joint sensors, eliminating the need for external sensors. We evaluated various convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures and collected a dataset to study the impact of data representation and model architecture on the recognition accuracy. Our results show that spectrogram-based representations significantly improve accuracy, while model architecture plays a smaller role. We also tested generalization to new robot poses, where spectrogram-based models performed better. Implemented on a Franka Emika Research robot, two of our methods, STFT2DCNN and STT3DCNN, achieved over 95% accuracy in contact detection and gesture classification. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of external-sensor-free tactile recognition and promote further research toward cost-effective, scalable solutions for HRC.

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

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