Simulation of Tactile Sensing Arrays for Physical Interaction Tasks

Abstract

Simulated worlds are important enablers and accelerators of new algorithms for autonomous robot applications. A framework for tactile servoing in the simulated world is presented. This framework includes a general model of tactile sensing arrays that can simulate the behavior of a real tactile sensing array thanks to an empirical characterization procedure. After obtaining the precise sensor model, different tactile servoing schemes can be implemented in the framework by controlling contact features, including points and lines extracted from the simulated contact images. Several experiments have been performed in order to guarantee the correspondence between the simulated results generated by the framework and the real ones executed with different sensors and robots.

Grasp Stability Prediction with Sim-to-Real Transfer from Tactile Sensing

“…To integrate the tactile simulation with physics simulation for manipulation tasks, Moisio et al [14] simulated a low-resolution tactile sensor considering soft contacts and full friction description and applied it on grasping tasks. Kappassov et al [15] presented a tactile simulation framework for tactile arrays in Gazebo simulation environment considering the effect of contact forces and showed tactile servoing applications. Wang et al [12] presented TACTO, a simulator using pyrender to simulate optical tactile sensors and combined it to a physics simulator PyBullet.…”

“…1: The pipeline of Sim2Real grasping stability prediction: we train an grasping stability prediction model using tactile images collected in our simulation and then test its performance on realworld tactile images. [15] model the contact dynamics for low-resolution tactile sensors but they are rather simpler than modeling for the vision-based tactile sensors and cannot be applied for most perception tasks. In order to benefit both perception and manipulation tasks, we proposal to integrate a realistic dense vision-based tactile sensor simulation with existing robot simulation engines by bridging with a contact dynamics simulation model.…”

Tactile-Based Task Definition Through Edge Contact Formation Setpoints for Object Exploration and Manipulation

“…where f is the force causing deformation, d, of the sensing surface along z-axis, since the latter is elastic. The applied stress at the points of contact diffuses uniformly (mathematically it can be viewed as a point-spread function [27]). Given a compliance constant of the elastic surface C, d = Cf .…”

Elastic Tactile Simulation Towards Tactile-Visual Perception

“…Existing trails that consider simulating tactile interactions with manipulated objects [2,14,18,21] usually model the tactile sensor as a combination of rigid bodies, and the collision between two objects is described by rigid multi-body kinematics provided by certain offthe-shelf physical engines (such as ODE in [14]). Despite its validity in some cases, considering the tactile sensor as a rigid multi-body will overlook the fact that common tactile sensors are usually elastic but not rigid.…”