Haptic Intelligence Autonomous Learning Empirical Inference Miscellaneous 2024

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}
}