Shape reconstruction of CCD camera-based soft tactile sensors

Abstract

CCD camera-based tactile sensors provide high-resolution information about the deformation of soft and elastic interfaces. However, they have poor scalibility as it is difficult to sense a large surface area without increasing the distance between the camera and the interface or using multiple processing chips. For example, using such tactile sensors for a whole robotic arm is not yet possible. In this work, we demonstrate a data driven method that can reconstruct the high-resolution information about deformation of the soft interface while keeping the space requirements and power consumption relatively low. Our modified tactile sensor incorporates two independent sensing techniques, one low- and one high-resolution, and we learn to map to the latter from the former. As a low-resolution sensor, we use liquid-filled channels that transmit the information from the location of the tactile interaction to a rigid display, where the liquid displacements are tracked by a CCD camera. Simultaneously, the same interaction is measured by tracking the markers on the bottom of the sensor using a second CCD camera. After data collection, we train two different machine learning models to reconstruct the time series of the high-resolution sensor. By training a convolutional autoencoder (CAE) and attaching it to the recurrent neural network (RNN), we demonstrate the reconstruction of high-resolution video frames using only the time series of the low-resolution sensor.