An Event-Based Opto-Tactile Skin

TL;DR

This paper introduces a neuromorphic, event-driven tactile sensing system using DVS cameras and optical waveguides for wide-area, flexible skin, achieving accurate press localization with low data rates and promising applications in soft robotics.

Contribution

The novel integration of DVS cameras with optical waveguides enables wide-area, flexible tactile sensing with robust localization even under significant data reduction.

Findings

Achieved 4.66 mm RMSE in press localization over 4620 mm² area.

Localization error increased only slightly to 9.33 mm with 1/1024 event data.

System maintains 85% valid localization rate under extreme data reduction.

Abstract

This paper presents a neuromorphic, event-driven tactile sensing system for soft, large-area skin, based on the Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVS) integrated with a flexible silicone optical waveguide skin. Instead of repetitively scanning embedded photoreceivers, this design uses a stereo vision setup comprising two DVS cameras looking sideways through the skin. Such a design produces events as changes in brightness are detected, and estimates press positions on the 2D skin surface through triangulation, utilizing Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) to find the center of mass of contact events resulting from pressing actions. The system is evaluated over a 4620 mm2 probed area of the skin using a meander raster scan. Across 95 % of the presses visible to both cameras, the press localization achieved a Root-Mean-Squared Error (RMSE) of 4.66 mm. The results highlight the potential of this approach for wide-area flexible and responsive tactile sensors in soft robotics and interactive environments. Moreover, we examined how the system performs when the amount of event data is strongly reduced. Using stochastic down-sampling, the event stream was reduced to 1/1024 of its original size. Under this extreme reduction, the average localization error increased only slightly (from 4.66 mm to 9.33 mm), and the system still produced valid press localizations for 85 % of the trials. This reduction in pass rate is expected, as some presses no longer produce enough events to form a reliable cluster for triangulation. These results show that the sensing approach remains functional even with very sparse event data, which is promising for reducing power consumption and computational load in future implementations. The system exhibits a detection latency distribution with a characteristic width of 31 ms.