AllTact Fin Ray: A Compliant Robot Gripper with Omni-Directional Tactile Sensing
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Apr 25, 2025
Abstract
Tactile sensing plays a crucial role in robot grasping and manipulation by
providing essential contact information between the robot and the environment.
In this paper, we present AllTact Fin Ray, a novel compliant gripper design
with omni-directional and local tactile sensing capabilities. The finger body
is unibody-casted using transparent elastic silicone, and a camera positioned
at the base of the finger captures the deformation of the whole body and the
contact face. Due to the global deformation of the adaptive structure, existing
vision-based tactile sensing approaches that assume constant illumination are
no longer applicable. To address this, we propose a novel sensing method where
the global deformation is first reconstructed from the image using edge
features and spatial constraints. Then, detailed contact geometry is computed
from the brightness difference against a dynamically retrieved reference image.
Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed gripper design
and sensing method in contact detection, force estimation, object grasping, and
precise manipulation.
