Can a Robot Read Braille? - Learning to Adapt Contact via Imitation Learning for Tactile Braille Recognition
This study addresses the problem of inadequate and often overlooked physical contact quality in robotic Braille reading by proposing an adaptive contact framework. This method introduces active contact adjustment into the Braille reading pipeline for the first time, jointly optimizing contact acceptability and pose correction through imitation learning. Furthermore, it integrates multi-head policy learning with pose-aware tactile fusion to achieve reliable reconstruction. Experimental evaluations on 20 physical Braille boards demonstrate that the proposed system attains a 94.0% tactile quality assessment score and an 88.6% reconstruction accuracy. These results validate the critical role of the active contact mechanism in enhancing recognition robustness for tactile reading tasks.