TACTFUL: Tactile-Driven Exploration For Object Localization and Identification in Confined Environments

TACTFUL is a novel tactile exploration framework designed for multi-fingered robots, enabling vision-free object localization and identification in confined environments. It employs a single policy trained on real hardware, achieving a 77% success rate and a 0.015 m average reconstruction error through a dynamic reward schedule that balances global exploration and local refinement. This approach highlights the potential of tactile sensing as a primary modality for object-level reasoning, offering significant implications for practitioners developing autonomous robotic systems.