Visuotactile Sensors With Emphasis on GelSight Sensor: A Review

Abstract

This review paper focuses on vision and touch-based sensors known as visuotactile. The study of visuotactile sensation and perception became a multidisciplinary field of study by philosophers, psychologists, biologists, engineers, technologists, and roboticists in the fields of haptics, machine vision, and artificial intelligence and it dates back centuries. To the best of our knowledge, the earliest records of visuotactile sensor was not applied to robotics and was not even for hand or finger imprint analysis yet for recording the foot pressure distribution of a walking or standing human known as pedobarograph. Our review paper presents the different literature related to visuotactile sensors that lead to a high-resolution miniature pedobarograph-like sensor known as the GelSight sensor. Moreover, this review paper focuses on architecture, different techniques, hardware, and software development of GelSight sensor since 2009 with its applications in haptics, robotics, and computer vision.