GelBelt: A Vision-based Tactile Sensor for Continuous Sensing of Large Surfaces
This addresses the need for scanning large surfaces in applications like surface reconstruction and industrial defect detection, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing vision-based tactile sensor technology.
The paper tackled the problem of continuous sensing on large surfaces by introducing a novel vision-based tactile sensor using an elastomeric belt and wheels, achieving high accuracy at scanning speeds up to 45 mm/s.
Scanning large-scale surfaces is widely demanded in surface reconstruction applications and detecting defects in industries' quality control and maintenance stages. Traditional vision-based tactile sensors have shown promising performance in high-resolution shape reconstruction while suffering limitations such as small sensing areas or susceptibility to damage when slid across surfaces, making them unsuitable for continuous sensing on large surfaces. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a novel vision-based tactile sensor designed for continuous surface sensing applications. Our design uses an elastomeric belt and two wheels to continuously scan the target surface. The proposed sensor showed promising results in both shape reconstruction and surface fusion, indicating its applicability. The dot product of the estimated and reference surface normal map is reported over the sensing area and for different scanning speeds. Results indicate that the proposed sensor can rapidly scan large-scale surfaces with high accuracy at speeds up to 45 mm/s.