LightTact：変形に依存しない接触センシングを実現する視覚触覚指先センサ
LightTact: A Visual-Tactile Fingertip Sensor for Deformation-Independent Contact Sensing
接触時に生じる散乱光のみを捉える光学構成により、変形を伴わない軽微な接触を高コントラストで可視化する視覚触覚センサを開発し、水やクリームなどへの接触を要するロボット操作を実現した。
詳しい要約
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著者: Changyi Lin, Boda Huo, Mingyang Yu, Emily Ruppel, Bingqing Chen, Jonathan Francis, Ding Zhao
分類: cs.RO
原文アブストラクト
Contact often occurs without macroscopic surface deformation, such as during interaction with liquids, semi-liquids, or ultra-soft materials. However, most existing tactile sensors rely on deformation to infer contact, making such light-contact interactions difficult to perceive robustly. To address this, we present LightTact, a visual-tactile fingertip sensor that makes contact directly visible via a deformation-independent principle. LightTact features an ambient-blocking optical configuration that suppresses both external light and internal illumination at non-contact regions, while transmitting only the scattered light generated at true contacts. As a result, LightTact produces high-contrast raw images in which non-contact pixels remain near-black (mean gray value < 3) and contact pixels preserve the natural appearance of the contacting surface. Built on this, LightTact achieves accurate pixel-level contact segmentation that is robust to material properties, contact force, surface appearance, and environmental lighting. We further demonstrate that LightTact unlocks new robotic manipulation behaviors that require detection of extremely light contact, including water spreading, facial-cream dipping, and soft thin-film interaction. In addition, we show that LightTact's spatially aligned visual-tactile images can be directly interpreted by vision-language models.
