ARMCL: ARM Contact point Localization via Monte Carlo Localization

Detecting and localizing contacts acting on a manipulator is a relevant problem for manipulation tasks like grasping, since contact information can be helpful for recovering from collisions or for improving the grasping performance itself. In this work, we present a solution for contact point localization, which is based on Monte Carlo Localization. Usually, an Articulated Robotic Manipulator (ARM) is not equipped with tactile skin, but with proprioceptive sensors, which we assume as an input for our method. In our experiments, we compare our method with a direct optimization method, machine learning approaches and another particle filter method, both on simulated and real world data from a Kinova Jaco2. While our proposed method clearly outperforms the other optimization approaches, it performs about equally well as Random Forest (RF) classifiers, although both methods have their strengths on different parts of the manipulator, and even achieves better results than multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) on the links farthest from the manipulator base.