OmniTact: A Multi-Directional High Resolution Touch Sensor
This addresses the need for improved touch sensing in robotics, particularly for dexterous manipulation tasks, and is incremental as it builds on existing tactile sensor technology with enhanced features.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling finer and robust robotic manipulation by introducing OmniTact, a multi-directional high-resolution tactile sensor that uses micro-cameras to detect deformations, resulting in reliable insertion of an electrical connector and higher accuracy in state estimation tasks compared to existing sensors.
Incorporating touch as a sensing modality for robots can enable finer and more robust manipulation skills. Existing tactile sensors are either flat, have small sensitive fields or only provide low-resolution signals. In this paper, we introduce OmniTact, a multi-directional high-resolution tactile sensor. OmniTact is designed to be used as a fingertip for robotic manipulation with robotic hands, and uses multiple micro-cameras to detect multi-directional deformations of a gel-based skin. This provides a rich signal from which a variety of different contact state variables can be inferred using modern image processing and computer vision methods. We evaluate the capabilities of OmniTact on a challenging robotic control task that requires inserting an electrical connector into an outlet, as well as a state estimation problem that is representative of those typically encountered in dexterous robotic manipulation, where the goal is to infer the angle of contact of a curved finger pressing against an object. Both tasks are performed using only touch sensing and deep convolutional neural networks to process images from the sensor's cameras. We compare with a state-of-the-art tactile sensor that is only sensitive on one side, as well as a state-of-the-art multi-directional tactile sensor, and find that OmniTact's combination of high-resolution and multi-directional sensing is crucial for reliably inserting the electrical connector and allows for higher accuracy in the state estimation task. Videos and supplementary material can be found at https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/omnitact