北京通用人工智能研究院BIGAI

R-Tac: A Rounded High-Frequency Transferable Monochrome Vision-based Tactile Sensor for Shape Reconstruction

Basic Information

Abstract

Endowing the curved surfaces of rounded vision based tactile fingers is essential for dexterous robotic manipulation, as they offer more sufficient contact with the environment. However, current rounded designs are constrained by a low sensing frequency (30–60 Hz) and the need for recalibration when adapting to new sensors due to the reliance on multichannel captures, which hinders their performance in dynamic robotic tasks and large-scale deployment. In this work, we introduce R-Tac0, a low-cost rounded VBTS engineered for high-resolution and high-speed perception. The key innovation is a monochrome vision-based sensing principle: utilizing a black-and-white camera to capture the reflection properties of the compound rounded elastomer under monochromatic illumination. This single-channel imaging significantly reduces data volume and simplifies computational complexity, enabling 120 Hz tactile perception. A lightweight neural network can calibrate the sensor to achieve a depth reconstruction accuracy of 0.169 mm per pixel, while exhibiting surprisingly good transferability to new sensors. In experiments, we demonstrate the advantages of R-Tac0’s rounded design by evaluating its performance under different contact angles, its high-frequency perception in slip detection, and its effectiveness in robotic dynamic pose estimation.