GelSlim: A High-Resolution, Compact, Robust, and Calibrated Tactile-sensing Finger

By E. Donlon, Siyuan Dong, Melody Liu, Jianhua Li, Edward H. Adelson, Alberto Rodriguez. IEEE/RJS International Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems, 2018

359 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This work describes the development of a high-resolution tactile-sensing finger for robot grasping. This finger, inspired by previous GelSight sensing techniques (Johnson and Adelson 2009), features an integration that is slimmer, more robust, and with more homogeneous output than previous vision-based tactile sensors. To achieve a compact integration, we redesign the optical path from illumination source to camera by combining light guides and an arrangement of mirror reflections. We parameterize the optical path with geometric design variables and describe the tradeoffs between the finger thickness, camera depth of field, and size of the tactile sensing area. The sensor sustains the wear from continuous use - and abuse - in grasping tasks by combining tougher materials for the compliant gel, a textured fabric skin, a structurally rigid body, and a calibration process that maintains homogeneous illumination and contrast of the tactile images during use. Finally, we evaluate the sensor's durability along four metrics that track the signal quality during more than 3000 grasping experiments.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience, Control and Systems Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc27f16c7ef564ee3ea36311c3bb1e30f98f21c8

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Robotic pick-and-place of novel objects in clutter with multi-affordance grasping and cross-domain image matching (2017, background): “make an effective use of tactile feedback is a promising direction that we have started to explore (Donlon et al., 2018; Hogan et al., 2018).”
DIGIT: A Novel Design for a Low-Cost Compact High-Resolution Tactile Sensor With Application to In-Hand Manipulation (2020, background): “In addition, DIGIT retains the rich and sensitive measurements characteristic of previous vision-based sensors [16], [10], [11], [12].”
ReSkin: versatile, replaceable, lasting tactile skins (2021, background): “While optical sensors provide high spatial resolution data, they also require a clear line of sight between the camera and elastomer to observe deformations[1, 21, 22].”
Cable manipulation with a tactile-reactive gripper (2019, background): “Vision-based tactile sensors [1], [15], [13], [16], [17] use a camera to capture the deformation of their contact surface with high-resolution images, which may encode information of local geometry, forces, and possibly slip.”