DexiTac: Soft Dexterous Tactile Gripping

TL;DR

This paper introduces DexiTac, a reconfigurable pneumatic gripper with integrated tactile sensors and a double closed-loop control system, enabling versatile, stable, and dexterous robotic grasping and manipulation.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel soft dexterous gripper with reconfigurable fingers, integrated tactile sensing, and a tactile kernel density control strategy for improved manipulation.

Findings

Successful demonstration of versatile grasp configurations.

Effective tactile-based control for stability and disturbance response.

Enhanced dexterity and adaptability in robotic manipulation.

Abstract

Grasping object,whether they are flat, round, or narrow and whether they have regular or irregular shapes,introduces difficulties in determining the ideal grasping posture, even for the most state-of-the-art grippers. In this article, we presented a reconfigurable pneumatic gripper with fingers that could be set in various configurations, such as hooking, supporting, closuring, and pinching. Each finger incorporates a dexterous joint, a rotating joint, and a customized plug-and-play visuotactile sensor, the DigiTac-v1.5, to control manipulation in real time. We propose a tactile kernel density manipulation strategy for simple and versatile control, including detecting grasp stability, responding to disturbances and guiding dexterous manipulations. We develop a double closed-loop control system that separately focuses on secure grasping and task management, demonstrated with tasks that highlight the capabilities above. The gripper is relatively easy to fabricate and customize, offering a promising and extensible way to combine soft dexterity and tactile sensing for diverse applications in robotic manipulation.