Demonstration: Minsight - A Soft Vision-Based Tactile Sensor for Robotic Fingertips
Beyond vision and hearing, tactile sensing enhances a robot's ability to dexterously manipulate unfamiliar objects and safely interact with humans. Giving touch sensitivity to robots requires compact, robust, affordable, and efficient hardware designs, especially for high-resolution tactile sensing. We present a soft vision-based tactile sensor engineered to meet these requirements. Comparable in size to a human fingertip, Minsight uses machine learning to output high-resolution directional contact force distributions at 60 Hz. Minsight's tactile force maps enable precise sensing of fingertip contacts, which we use in this hands-on demonstration to allow a 3-DoF robot arm to physically track contact with a user's finger. While observing the colorful image captured by Minsight's internal camera, attendees can experience how its ability to detect delicate touches in all directions facilitates real-time robot interaction.
| Author(s): | Iris Andrussow and Huanbo Sun and Georg Martius and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker |
| Year: | 2024 |
| Month: | November |
| Project(s): | |
| Bibtex Type: | Miscellaneous (misc) |
| Address: | Munich, Germany |
| Electronic Archiving: | grant_archive |
| How Published: | Hands-on demonstration presented at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) |
| State: | Published |
BibTex
@misc{Andrussow24-CORLD-Minsight,
title = {Demonstration: {M}insight - A Soft Vision-Based Tactile Sensor for Robotic Fingertips},
abstract = {Beyond vision and hearing, tactile sensing enhances a robot's ability to dexterously manipulate unfamiliar objects and safely interact with humans. Giving touch sensitivity to robots requires compact, robust, affordable, and efficient hardware designs, especially for high-resolution tactile sensing. We present a soft vision-based tactile sensor engineered to meet these requirements. Comparable in size to a human fingertip, Minsight uses machine learning to output high-resolution directional contact force distributions at 60 Hz. Minsight's tactile force maps enable precise sensing of fingertip contacts, which we use in this hands-on demonstration to allow a 3-DoF robot arm to physically track contact with a user's finger. While observing the colorful image captured by Minsight's internal camera, attendees can experience how its ability to detect delicate touches in all directions facilitates real-time robot interaction.},
howpublished = {Hands-on demonstration presented at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)},
address = {Munich, Germany},
month = nov,
year = {2024},
slug = {andrussow24-corld-minsight},
author = {Andrussow, Iris and Sun, Huanbo and Martius, Georg and Kuchenbecker, Katherine J.},
month_numeric = {11}
}