GelTip: A Finger-shaped Optical Tactile Sensor for Robotic Manipulation



Gomes, Daniel Fernandes, Lin, Zhonglin and Luo, Shan ORCID: 0000-0003-4760-0372
(2020) GelTip: A Finger-shaped Optical Tactile Sensor for Robotic Manipulation. In: 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2020-10-24 - 2021-1-24, Las Vegas, USA.

[img] Text
IROS_GelTip.pdf - Author Accepted Manuscript

Download (5MB) | Preview

Abstract

Sensing contacts throughout the fingers is an essential capability for a robot to perform manipulation tasks in cluttered environments. However, existing tactile sensors either only have a flat sensing surface or a compliant tip with a limited sensing area. In this paper, we propose a novel optical tactile sensor, the GelTip, that is shaped as a finger and can sense contacts on any location of its surface. The sensor captures high-resolution and color-invariant tactile image that can be exploited to extract detailed information about the end-effector's interactions against manipulated objects. Our extensive experiments show that the GelTip sensor can effectively localise the contacts on different locations its finger-shaped body, with a small localisation error of approximately 5 mm, on average, and under 1 mm in the best cases. The obtained results show the potential of the GelTip sensor in facilitating dynamic manipulation tasks with its all-round tactile sensing capability. The sensor models and further information about the GelTip sensor can be found at http://danfergo.github.io/geltip.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Unspecified)
Uncontrolled Keywords: Bioengineering
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 12 Aug 2020 11:06
Last Modified: 15 Mar 2024 14:41
DOI: 10.1109/iros45743.2020.9340881
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3097278