AllSight: A Low-Cost and High-Resolution Round Tactile Sensor with Zero-Shot Learning Capability

TL;DR

AllSight is a low-cost, 3D-printed optical tactile sensor with high resolution and zero-shot learning capability, enabling accurate contact state estimation for robotic manipulation without extensive calibration.

Contribution

The paper introduces AllSight, a novel low-cost, modular, 3D-printed tactile sensor with zero-shot learning, simplifying fabrication and calibration for robotic tactile sensing.

Findings

Accurate contact state estimation demonstrated in experiments

Zero-shot learning enables immediate use after fabrication

Flexible design with various illumination and elastomer configurations

Abstract

Tactile sensing is a necessary capability for a robotic hand to perform fine manipulations and interact with the environment. Optical sensors are a promising solution for high-resolution contact estimation. Nevertheless, they are usually not easy to fabricate and require individual calibration in order to acquire sufficient accuracy. In this letter, we propose AllSight, an optical tactile sensor with a round 3D structure potentially designed for robotic in-hand manipulation tasks. AllSight is mostly 3D printed making it low-cost, modular, durable and in the size of a human thumb while with a large contact surface. We show the ability of AllSight to learn and estimate a full contact state, i.e., contact position, forces and torsion. With that, an experimental benchmark between various configurations of illumination and contact elastomers are provided. Furthermore, the robust design of AllSight provides it with a unique zero-shot capability such that a practitioner can fabricate the open-source design and have a ready-to-use state estimation model. A set of experiments demonstrates the accurate state estimation performance of AllSight.