GelSight Wedge: Measuring High-Resolution 3D Contact

Geometry with a Compact Robot Finger


Shaoxiong Wang   Yu She   Branden Romero   Edward H. Adelson


MIT


Vision-based tactile sensors have the potential to provide important contact geometry to localize the objective with visual occlusion. However, it is challenging to measure high- resolution 3D contact geometry for a compact robot finger, to simultaneously meet optical and mechanical constraints.

In this work, we present the GelSight Wedge sensor, which is optimized to have a compact shape for robot fingers, while achieving high- resolution 3D reconstruction. We evaluate the 3D reconstruction under different lighting configurations, and extend the method from 3 lights to 1 or 2 lights. We demonstrate the flexibility of the design by shrinking the sensor to the size of a human finger for fine manipulation tasks. We also show the effectiveness and potential of the reconstructed 3D geometry for pose tracking in the 3D space.


ICRA'21 Presentation

(10 minutes)



Supplementary Materials

(3 minutes)




If you cannot access the video, please download our video here.


Paper



GelSight Wedge: Measuring High-Resolution 3D Contact Geometry with a Compact Robot Finger
Shaoxiong Wang, Yu She, Branden Romero, and Edward H. Adelson
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2021
[Paper][BibTeX]