Contact Tracing: A Low Cost Reconstruction Framework for Surface Contact Interpolation

We present a novel, low cost framework for reconstructing surface contact movements during in-hand manipulations. Unlike many existing methods focused on hand pose tracking, ours models the behavior of contact patches, and by doing so is the first to obtain detailed contact tracking estimates for multi-contact manipulations. Our framework is highly accessible, requiring only low cost, readily available paint materials, a single RGBD camera, and a simple, deterministic interpolation algorithm. Despite its simplicity, we demonstrate the framework’s effectiveness over the course of several manipulations on three common household items. Finally, we demonstrate the use of a generated contact time series in manipulation learning for a simulated robot hand.