BubbleTouch: A Quasi-Static Tactile Skin Simulator

TL;DR

BubbleTouch is an open-source simulator that models tactile skin contact for robots, enabling detailed force analysis and supporting tactile object recognition experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel quasi-static tactile skin simulator that facilitates contact force simulation and experimental research in tactile sensing.

Findings

Supports detailed contact force tracing

Enables tactile object recognition experiments

Open source and easy to use

Abstract

We present BubbleTouch, an open source quasi-static simulator for robotic tactile skins. BubbleTouch can be used to simulate contact with a robot's tactile skin patches as it interacts with humans and objects. The simulator creates detailed traces of contact forces that can be used in experiments in tactile contact activities. We summarize the design of BubbleTouch and highlight our recent work that uses BubbleTouch for experiments with tactile object recognition.