Tactile Behaviors with the Vision-Based Tactile Sensor FingerVision

Abstract

This paper introduces a vision-based tactile sensor FingerVision, and explores its usefulness in tactile behaviors. FingerVision consists of a transparent elastic skin marked with dots, and a camera that is easy to fabricate, low cost, and physically robust. Unlike other vision-based tactile sensors, the complete transparency of the FingerVision skin provides multimodal sensation. The modalities sensed by FingerVision include distributions of force and slip, and object information such as distance, location, pose, size, shape, and texture. The slip detection is very sensitive since it is obtained by computer vision directly applied to the output from the FingerVision camera. It provides high-resolution slip detection, which does not depend on the contact force, i.e., it can sense slip of a lightweight object that generates negligible contact force. The tactile behaviors explored in this paper include manipulations that utilize this feature. For example, we demonstrate that grasp adaptation with FingerVision can grasp origami, and other deformable and fragile objects such as vegetables, fruits, and raw eggs.