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When Vision Meets Touch: A Contemporary Review for Visuotactile Sensors from the Signal Processing Perspective

Shoujie Li, Zihan Wang, Changsheng Wu, Xiang Li, Shan Luo, Bin Fang, Fuchun Sun, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Wenbo Ding

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive review of visuotactile sensors from the perspective of signal processing methods and outlooks possible future research directions for visuotactile sensors.

Abstract

Tactile sensors, which provide information about the physical properties of objects, are an essential component of robotic systems. The visuotactile sensing technology with the merits of high resolution and low cost has facilitated the development of robotics from environment exploration to dexterous operation. Over the years, several reviews on visuotactile sensors for robots have been presented, but few of them discussed the significance of signal processing methods to visuotactile sensors. Apart from ingenious hardware design, the full potential of the sensory system toward designated tasks can only be released with the appropriate signal processing methods. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive review of visuotactile sensors from the perspective of signal processing methods and outlooks possible future research directions for visuotactile sensors.

When Vision Meets Touch: A Contemporary Review for Visuotactile Sensors from the Signal Processing Perspective

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive review of visuotactile sensors from the perspective of signal processing methods and outlooks possible future research directions for visuotactile sensors.

Abstract

Tactile sensors, which provide information about the physical properties of objects, are an essential component of robotic systems. The visuotactile sensing technology with the merits of high resolution and low cost has facilitated the development of robotics from environment exploration to dexterous operation. Over the years, several reviews on visuotactile sensors for robots have been presented, but few of them discussed the significance of signal processing methods to visuotactile sensors. Apart from ingenious hardware design, the full potential of the sensory system toward designated tasks can only be released with the appropriate signal processing methods. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive review of visuotactile sensors from the perspective of signal processing methods and outlooks possible future research directions for visuotactile sensors.
Paper Structure (38 sections, 9 equations, 14 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 38 sections, 9 equations, 14 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Sensor Design
  3. Sensing skin
  4. Shape
  5. Marker
  6. Material
  7. Functional layers
  8. Illumination system
  9. Vision system
  10. Signal Processing for Visuotactile Sensor
  11. Contact area segmentation
  12. 3D Reconstruction
  13. Photometric stereo methods
  14. Luminance reconstruction methods
  15. Binocular imaging methods
  16. ...and 23 more sections

Figures (14)

  • Figure 1: Trends in the intersections between the tactile sensor and optical hardware. Left: Tactile sensors from single-point force sensors to e-skin. Middle: The green boxes indicate the different parts of the robot designed using the visuotactile sensors, such as fingers sun2022soft, palms cui2021hand, arms 9247533, and feet stone2020walking. The blue box indicates the application of visuotactile sensors yuan2017GelSightpadmanabha2020omnitacttrueeb2020towardslambeta2020digitkuppuswamy2020softdo2022densetactli2022tatakumagai2019eventliu2022GelSightshe2020exoskeletonlepora2021posema2019dense. Bottom: Optical hardware from RGB cameras to event-based dynamic vision sensors.
  • Figure 2: The structure of the visuotactile sensor, which includes sensing skin, illumination system, and vision system.
  • Figure 3: A typical structure of the sensing skin includes a support layer, contact layer, marker layer, reflective layer, and protective layer.
  • Figure 4: Visuotactile sensor signal processing framework.
  • Figure 5: Reconstruction effect with photometric stereo method wang2021GelSight.
  • ...and 9 more figures