Can a Robot Read Braille? - Learning to Adapt Contact via Imitation Learning for Tactile Braille Recognition

2026-09-24

AI Summary

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.

Abstract

For people who are blind, touch provides an essen-tial channel for accessing written information through Braille. Bringing a similar capability to robots requires them not only to recognize tactile patterns, but also to actively establish physical contact that makes those patterns readable. Yet existing robotic Braille readers largely focus on recognition after contact, leaving contact establishment itself insufficiently addressed. We present an adaptive-contact framework for robotic tactile Braille reading that assesses contact quality and physically corrects unsuitable contact before recognition and reconstruc-tion. Multi-Head Policy Learning uses expert-guided contact-adjustment demonstrations to jointly learn contact acceptability and pose corrections. During deployment, the robot iteratively evaluates and re-establishes contact, retaining reliable tactile observations for pose-aware fusion and Braille reconstruction. Across 20 physical Braille plates used for learning and eval-uation, the proposed approach achieves 94.0% tactile quality and 88.6% tactile reconstruction on the ten online-evaluation plates. These results demonstrate the importance of actively establishing readable contact, rather than relying solely on recognition under imperfect tactile observations, for reliable robotic Braille reading.

Problem

• Robotic Braille reading
• Tactile recognition
• Contact establishment
• Adaptive contact

Innovation

• Tactile Braille Recognition
• Imitation Learning
• Adaptive Contact
• Multi-Head Policy Learning
• Pose-Aware Fusion