LESS (Local Encoder for Spatial Sensing)
Over 800 hours of robotic tactile palpation of soft breast phantoms, paired with MRI ground-truth volumes, for learning subsurface tactile imaging.
| Year | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Total hours | 800 |
| Embodiments | franka_panda |
| Modalities | ee_pose, force_torque, proprioception, tactile |
| Task categories | manipulation |
| License | CC-BY-4.0 |
| Access | open — commercial use permitted |
| Maintainer | Technion – Israel Institute of Technology |
LESS ("More with LESS: Local Scene Representations for Tactile Imaging", RSS 2026) tackles artificial palpation — reconstructing what is inside a soft object purely by touching it. The motivating application is breast cancer screening, where over 40% of cases are first detected by palpation.
- >800 hours of robotic tactile interaction, released as ~66 GB across three Zenodo records (poke 40.3 GB, primitive 19.3 GB, out-of-distribution bundle 6.4 GB).
- Collected with a motorised lift plus a Franka Panda arm carrying a gel-based tactile sensor, executing systematic poke and sweep primitives over a library of modular silicone breast phantoms, each containing a harder spherical inclusion at varying shape and location.
- Every phantom configuration is scanned in an MRI machine, so each tactile sequence is paired with a volumetric ground-truth label — a rare combination in robot tactile data.
- Four splits support explicit generalisation tests: poke-primitive (training, single inclusions), poke-big (zero-shot to 4× larger phantoms), poke-multi (zero-shot to 2–3 simultaneous inclusions, never seen in training), and handheld (sensor held by a human, pose tracked by fiducials rather than robot kinematics).
- The accompanying method is a grid of GRU particle encoders with local receptive fields, each reconstructing a local patch — compositional by construction, which is why single-inclusion training transfers zero-shot to multi-inclusion phantoms.
- Supports 2D and 3D reconstruction plus spatial uncertainty estimation, and enabled the first real-time hand-held tactile imaging device with 3D output.
Data is CC BY 4.0; the code is MIT.