When Vision Meets Touch: A Contemporary Review for Visuotactile Sensors from the Signal Processing Perspective

TL;DR

This paper reviews visuotactile sensors in robotics, emphasizing the importance of signal processing techniques to enhance sensor performance and outlining future research directions in this field.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of visuotactile sensors focusing on signal processing methods, which has been less explored in previous reviews.

Findings

Highlighting the role of signal processing in sensor performance

Survey of current visuotactile sensor technologies

Outlook on future research directions

Abstract

Tactile sensors, which provide information about the physical properties of objects, are an essential component of robotic systems. The visuotactile sensing technology with the merits of high resolution and low cost has facilitated the development of robotics from environment exploration to dexterous operation. Over the years, several reviews on visuotactile sensors for robots have been presented, but few of them discussed the significance of signal processing methods to visuotactile sensors. Apart from ingenious hardware design, the full potential of the sensory system toward designated tasks can only be released with the appropriate signal processing methods. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive review of visuotactile sensors from the perspective of signal processing methods and outlooks possible future research directions for visuotactile sensors.