Dataset Collection Protocol
We collected ground truth data from three sources as described in the paper. We provide additional details on the data collection here.
For the planar-pushing data collection, we tracked the pose of the BioTac sensor and the pushed box by using DART[1] with contact prior to prevent the BioTac mesh from penetrating the box due to noisy image from the depth camera. We used rosbag to bag all the required topics during our data collection process. DART tracks at 60Hz while the biotac sensor readings are at 100Hz. We smooth and resample the pose data by applying a third order Savitzky–Golay filter with a window size of 51. We compute the velocity and acceleration of the box and the biotac from the smoothed and resampled pose data.
Due to time synchronization issues in ROS, at every time-step we additionally check if the biotac is not in contact with the box and project the biotac to be in contact by moving the pose along the smoothed spline function. This projection ensures the force inference optimization computes a realistic force, given the instantaneous object motion. We compute the force only when the object is in motion. We assume the object is static when the L-1 norm of instantaneous object velocity is less than 5e-3.