Robot operating in an open world can encounter
novel objects with unknown physical properties, such as mass,
friction, or size. It is desira
… (see more)ble to be able to sense those
property through contact-rich interaction, before performing
downstream tasks with the objects. We propose a method for
autonomously learning active tactile perception policies, by
learning a generative world model leveraging a differentiable
bayesian filtering algorithm, and designing an information-
gathering model predictive controller. We test the method on
three simulated tasks: mass estimation, height estimation and
toppling height estimation. Our method is able to discover
policies which gather information about the desired property
in an intuitive manner.