TactCLNet: Tactile Continual Learning Network Based on Generative Replay for Object Hardness Recognition

Currently, deep neural networks can be extremely effective in robotic tactile perception. However, a major challenge is to solve the problem of continual learning of robotic tactile perception in an open and dynamic environment. In this paper, we propose a novel continual learning method for the domian incremental learning task in the field of tactile perception. To be specific, we introduce a morphology-specific variational autoencoders which can mitigate catastrophic forgetting by generating pseudo-samples for training in the continual learning process. We integrate the generative model and the discriminative model into one model, which reduces the size of model and improves the continual learning ability. In addition, considering the ordinal information between the hardness levels, we propose to add conditional information to the model and introduce a modified loss function to combine the latent value with the hardness information, which improves the continual learning performance by controlling the distribution and quality of pseudo-sample generation. Following this, we designed a tactile robot experiment, collected hardness data, and tested our model on this object hardness recognition task. We show experimentally that, after training, the model can still maintain the accuracy of more than 94% after learning three tasks in terms. Note to Practitioners—In the field of robotics tactile perception, the issue of continual learning in robots is a crucial problem that urgently requires resolution. We hope robots to effectively engage in continual learning across multiple tasks, ensuring the acquisition of new knowledge while mitigating the risk of forgetting previously acquired knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel continual learning method for the domian incremental learning task. we introduce a morphology-specific variational autoencoders based on replaying pseudo-samples during continual learning process which reduces the size of model and improves the continual learning ability. We enhance model performance by integrating generative and discriminative models, incorporating conditional information to control the distribution of replayed sample types, and leveraging sequential relationships among samples. It is proved that the proposed method is able to effectively improve the accuracy in a tactile domian incremental learning task.