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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.
@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} }