GelSight Wedge: Measuring High-Resolution 3D Contact Geometry with a Compact Robot Finger
This addresses the problem of providing detailed contact geometry for robots with visual occlusion, though it appears incremental as an optimization of existing vision-based tactile sensor designs.
The paper tackled the challenge of measuring high-resolution 3D contact geometry for compact robot fingers by developing the GelSight Wedge sensor, which achieves high-resolution 3D reconstruction and was demonstrated to shrink to human finger size for fine manipulation tasks.
Vision-based tactile sensors have the potential to provide important contact geometry to localize the objective with visual occlusion. However, it is challenging to measure high-resolution 3D contact geometry for a compact robot finger, to simultaneously meet optical and mechanical constraints. In this work, we present the GelSight Wedge sensor, which is optimized to have a compact shape for robot fingers, while achieving high-resolution 3D reconstruction. We evaluate the 3D reconstruction under different lighting configurations, and extend the method from 3 lights to 1 or 2 lights. We demonstrate the flexibility of the design by shrinking the sensor to the size of a human finger for fine manipulation tasks. We also show the effectiveness and potential of the reconstructed 3D geometry for pose tracking in the 3D space.