SAFE: Unified Slip and Fracture Detection with Low-Cost Acoustic Sensing in Robotic Grasping

What happened

arXiv:2610.08802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Manipulating fragile objects remains challenging as robots must understand the state of what they grasp, such as slip or fracture, to respond appropriately, especially when material properties are unknown. Under leave-one-grasp-out cross-validation, SAFE achieves an Alert-F1 of 0.884 with near-zero slip-fracture confusion, and ablations confirm that acoustic sensing is indispensable.

An adaptive grasp controller built on this detection layer runs at 104 Hz on a Jetson Orin Nano, achieving 91.3% success across 46 closed-loop robot trials spanning diverse object categories, while each fixed-force strategy drops to 0% on object conditions that mismatch its preset. The sensors are mounted on a compliant Fin Ray gripper, and a unified HistGradientBoosting classifier reports the state (normal, slip, or fracture) from a 79-dimensional feature vector.