Multi-Resolution Tactile Imitation Learning for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

Touch sensing is beneficial for solving a wide variety of manipulation tasks. While there exists a wide range of tactile sensors with different properties, exploiting the fusion of multiple heterogeneous tactile sensors to improve manipulation learning remains underexplored. We present Multi-Resolution Tactile Sensing (MiTaS), a representation framework that leverages multiple tactile sensors operating at different temporal resolutions in order to solve complex contact-rich manipulation tasks. We propose an effective architecture using modality-specific convolutional stems and transformer-based fusion that effectively integrates information from an RGB camera stream, a vision-based GelSight Mini sensor and a high-frequency event-based Evetac sensor. This multisensory representation then conditions a flow-matching policy for solving downstream tasks. Our systematic study across five contact-rich manipulation tasks demonstrates the effectiveness of multi-resolution tactile features in imitation learning wherein MiTaS achieves an average success rate of 80 %, while vision-only (35.5,%) and visuotactile (55.5,%, 63,%) baselines cannot solve the task reliably. Project Page: http://mitas-touch.github.io.