Soft-bubble: A highly compliant dense geometry tactile sensor for robot manipulation
This addresses the problem of enabling robots to operate safely and effectively in cluttered, unknown environments, representing an incremental improvement in tactile sensing hardware.
The paper tackled the need for robust and safe robot manipulation in uncertain environments by developing a lightweight, highly compliant tactile sensor called Soft-bubble, which uses an inflated latex membrane and depth sensor to achieve tasks like tactile-object classification and nonprehensile manipulation with demonstrated capabilities.
Incorporating effective tactile sensing and mechanical compliance is key towards enabling robust and safe operation of robots in unknown, uncertain and cluttered environments. Towards realizing this goal, we present a lightweight, easy-to-build, highly compliant dense geometry sensor and end effector that comprises an inflated latex membrane with a depth sensor behind it. We present the motivations and the hardware design for this Soft-bubble and demonstrate its capabilities through example tasks including tactile-object classification, pose estimation and tracking, and nonprehensile object manipulation. We also present initial experiments to show the importance of high-resolution geometry sensing for tactile tasks and discuss applications in robust manipulation.