Researchers publish a 3D touch sensor and its entire software ecosystem; a CAD tool generates manufacturing files from a contour or text description.
A team led by Nitish Thakor presented OpenTac, a tactile sensor for robots with the entire software chain needed to design, simulate and operate it. The skin is resistive and covered with a structured deformable layer that transforms lateral forces into pressure variations. By comparing the responses of neighboring measurement points, the system deduces the local shear, while their common response gives the normal force.
From description to fabricated sensor
The design tool automatically generates manufacturing files from 2D contours, developable 3D surfaces or even a natural language request, such as "a sensor for a size 9 shoe sole". More than 30 sensors have been produced for different robots, and their measurements have been validated against a high-precision commercial force sensor. The ecosystem also includes a simulator, transfer methods from one sensor to another and adaptive acquisition.
This partial reading makes it possible to achieve rates of the order of kilohertz: on a skin of 1,024 points, reading only 16 points per update goes 19.2 times faster than a full scan. The authors have demonstrated the interest of 3D touch for control and manipulation learning on four real robots, and publish the hardware, software and videos.
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