Integrating robotics into human-centric environments such as homes, necessitates advanced manipulation skills as robotic devices will need to engage with articulated objects like doors and drawers. Key challenges in robotic manipulation are the unpredictability and diversity of these objects' internal structures, which render models based on priors, both explicit and implicit, inadequate. Their reliability is significantly diminished by pre-interaction ambiguities, imperfect structural parameters, encounters with unknown objects, and unforeseen disturbances. Here, we present a prior-free strategy, Tac-Man, focusing on maintaining stable robot-object contact during manipulation. Utilizing tactile feedback, but independent of object priors, Tac-Man enables robots to proficiently handle a variety of articulated objects, including those with complex joints, even when influenced by unexpected disturbances. Demonstrated in both real-world experiments and extensive simulations, it consistently achieves near-perfect success in dynamic and varied settings, outperforming existing methods. Our results indicate that tactile sensing alone suffices for managing diverse articulated objects, offering greater robustness and generalization than prior-based approaches. This underscores the importance of detailed contact modeling in complex manipulation tasks, especially with articulated objects. Advancements in tactile sensors significantly expand the scope of robotic applications in human-centric environments, particularly where accurate models are difficult to obtain.

翻译：将机器人技术融入家庭等以人为中心的环境，需要先进的操控技能，因为机器人设备需要与门、抽屉等铰接物体进行交互。机器人操作的关键挑战在于这些物体内部结构的不可预测性和多样性，这使得基于先验（无论是显式还是隐式）的模型变得不足。交互前的模糊性、不完美的结构参数、遇到未知物体以及不可预见的干扰，都显著降低了这些模型的可靠性。本文提出了一种无先验策略Tac-Man，其核心是在操作过程中保持稳定的机器人-物体接触。Tac-Man利用触觉反馈，但不依赖于物体先验知识，使机器人能够熟练处理各种铰接物体，包括具有复杂关节的物体，即使在受到意外干扰的情况下也是如此。在真实世界实验和大量仿真中的演示表明，它在动态多变的环境中始终能取得接近完美的成功率，性能优于现有方法。我们的结果表明，仅凭触觉感知就足以管理多样化的铰接物体，与基于先验的方法相比，提供了更强的鲁棒性和泛化能力。这突显了在复杂操作任务（尤其是涉及铰接物体的任务）中详细接触建模的重要性。触觉传感器的进步极大地扩展了机器人在以人为中心环境中的应用范围，特别是在难以获得精确模型的场景中。