The TacTip Family: Soft Optical Tactile Sensors with 3D-Printed Biomimetic Morphologies

By Benjamin Ward-Cherrier, Nicholas Pestell, Luke Cramphorn, B. Winstone, M. Giannaccini, J. Rossiter, Nathan F. Lepora. Soft Robotics, 2018

591 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Tactile sensing is an essential component in human–robot interaction and object manipulation. Soft sensors allow for safe interaction and improved gripping performance. Here we present the TacTip family of sensors: a range of soft optical tactile sensors with various morphologies fabricated through dual-material 3D printing. All of these sensors are inspired by the same biomimetic design principle: transducing deformation of the sensing surface via movement of pins analogous to the function of intermediate ridges within the human fingertip. The performance of the TacTip, TacTip-GR2, TacTip-M2, and TacCylinder sensors is here evaluated and shown to attain submillimeter accuracy on a rolling cylinder task, representing greater than 10-fold super-resolved acuity. A version of the TacTip sensor has also been open-sourced, enabling other laboratories to adopt it as a platform for tactile sensing and manipulation research. These sensors are suitable for real-world applications in tactile perception, exploration, and manipulation, and will enable further research and innovation in the field of soft tactile sensing.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/775e7d850e81e7de76e50577e38a1346003628ec

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Human-Computer Interaction

Citations in the corpus

Cable manipulation with a tactile-reactive gripper (2019, background): “Contour following of rigid objects has been widely studied using both visual [5] and tactile perception [6, 7].”
Soft Robotics: A Review of Recent Developments of Pneumatic Soft Actuators (2020, background): “Optical sensors may either visually track the soft robot [28], or may rely on detecting wavelength shift in a fiber optic cable due to the stretching and bending of the fiber optic [145,146].”
A Review of Tactile Information: Perception and Action Through Touch (2020, background): “The majority of tactile sensors are composed of arrays of sensing elements [3], [20]–[22], and each element in the array is known as a taxel .”
Soft magnetic skin for super-resolution tactile sensing with force self-decoupling (2021, background): “Among all, the tactile sensor arrays (8, 28) and the latest opticalbased sensors (20) can achieve super-resolution comparable to human skin, but the shortcomings in bulky structure (20) or solely normal force sensing (8, 28) limit their applications in robotic tasks that require compact sensor struc”
DIGIT: A Novel Design for a Low-Cost Compact High-Resolution Tactile Sensor With Application to In-Hand Manipulation (2020, background): “Previous vision-based tactile sensors include TacTip [13], [14], FingerVision [10], GelSight [11], [12] and several other [15], [24].”
GelSlim: A High-Resolution, Compact, Robust, and Calibrated Tactile-sensing Finger (2018, background): “To enhance the durability of the sensor surface, researchers have investigated using protective skins such as plastic [13], or making the sensing layer easier to replace by involving 3D printing techniques with soft material [19].”
Aligning Cyber Space With Physical World: A Comprehensive Survey on Embodied AI (2024, unknown): “For example, Translated LM [176] and Inner Monologue [177] can break down complex tasks into manageable steps and devise solutions using their internal logic and knowledge systems without additional training.”