Demonstration: Minsight - A Soft Vision-Based Tactile Sensor for Robotic Fingertips

2024

Miscellaneous

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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: Minsight - A Soft Vision-Based Tactile Sensor for Robotic Fingertips},
  author = {Andrussow, Iris and Sun, Huanbo and Martius, Georg and Kuchenbecker, Katherine J.},
  howpublished = {Hands-on demonstration presented at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)},
  address = {Munich, Germany},
  month = nov,
  year = {2024},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {11}
}