Tacchi: A Pluggable and Low Computational Cost Elastomer Deformation Simulator for Optical Tactile Sensors

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Chen, Zixi, Zhang, Shixin, Luo, Shan, Sun, Fuchun, Fang, Bin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866911060740538368
author Chen, Zixi
Zhang, Shixin
Luo, Shan
Sun, Fuchun
Fang, Bin
author_facet Chen, Zixi
Zhang, Shixin
Luo, Shan
Sun, Fuchun
Fang, Bin
contents Simulation is widely applied in robotics research to save time and resources. There have been several works to simulate optical tactile sensors that leverage either a smoothing method or Finite Element Method (FEM). However, elastomer deformation physics is not considered in the former method, whereas the latter requires a massive amount of computational resources like a computer cluster. In this work, we propose a pluggable and low computational cost simulator using the Taichi programming language for simulating optical tactile sensors, named as Tacchi . It reconstructs elastomer deformation using particles, which allows deformed elastomer surfaces to be rendered into tactile images and reveals contact information without suffering from high computational costs. Tacchi facilitates creating realistic tactile images in simulation, e.g., ones that capture wear-and-tear defects on object surfaces. In addition, the proposed Tacchi can be integrated with robotics simulators for a robot system simulation. Experiment results showed that Tacchi can produce images with better similarity to real images and achieved higher Sim2Real accuracy compared to the existing methods. Moreover, it can be connected with MuJoCo and Gazebo with only the requirement of 1G memory space in GPU compared to a computer cluster applied for FEM. With Tacchi, physical robot simulation with optical tactile sensors becomes possible. All the materials in this paper are available at https://github.com/zixichen007115/Tacchi .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2301_08343
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tacchi: A Pluggable and Low Computational Cost Elastomer Deformation Simulator for Optical Tactile Sensors
Chen, Zixi
Zhang, Shixin
Luo, Shan
Sun, Fuchun
Fang, Bin
Robotics
Simulation is widely applied in robotics research to save time and resources. There have been several works to simulate optical tactile sensors that leverage either a smoothing method or Finite Element Method (FEM). However, elastomer deformation physics is not considered in the former method, whereas the latter requires a massive amount of computational resources like a computer cluster. In this work, we propose a pluggable and low computational cost simulator using the Taichi programming language for simulating optical tactile sensors, named as Tacchi . It reconstructs elastomer deformation using particles, which allows deformed elastomer surfaces to be rendered into tactile images and reveals contact information without suffering from high computational costs. Tacchi facilitates creating realistic tactile images in simulation, e.g., ones that capture wear-and-tear defects on object surfaces. In addition, the proposed Tacchi can be integrated with robotics simulators for a robot system simulation. Experiment results showed that Tacchi can produce images with better similarity to real images and achieved higher Sim2Real accuracy compared to the existing methods. Moreover, it can be connected with MuJoCo and Gazebo with only the requirement of 1G memory space in GPU compared to a computer cluster applied for FEM. With Tacchi, physical robot simulation with optical tactile sensors becomes possible. All the materials in this paper are available at https://github.com/zixichen007115/Tacchi .
title Tacchi: A Pluggable and Low Computational Cost Elastomer Deformation Simulator for Optical Tactile Sensors
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.08343