StRETcH: a Soft to Resistive Elastic Tactile Hand
This work addresses robotic manipulation challenges for deformable objects, representing an incremental advancement in tactile sensing and control.
The paper tackled the problem of robotic manipulation of deformable objects by developing StRETcH, a variable stiffness soft tactile hand that estimates contact geometry with sub-millimeter accuracy and modulates stiffness from 4kPa to 9kPa, enabling tasks like reconstructing object shapes and manipulating dough.
Soft optical tactile sensors enable robots to manipulate deformable objects by capturing important features such as high-resolution contact geometry and estimations of object compliance. This work presents a variable stiffness soft tactile end-effector called StRETcH, a Soft to Resistive Elastic Tactile Hand, that is easily manufactured and integrated with a robotic arm. An elastic membrane is suspended between two robotic fingers, and a depth sensor capturing the deformations of the elastic membrane enables sub-millimeter accurate estimates of contact geometries. The parallel-jaw gripper varies the stiffness of the membrane by uni-axially stretching it, which controllably modulates StRETcH's effective modulus from approximately 4kPa to 9kPa. This work uses StRETcH to reconstruct the contact geometry of rigid and deformable objects, estimate the stiffness of four balloons filled with different substances, and manipulate dough into a desired shape.