GelSight Baby Fin Ray: A Compact, Compliant, Flexible Finger with High-Resolution Tactile Sensing

The synthesis of tactile sensing with compliance is essential to many fields, from agricultural usages like fruit picking, to sustainability practices such as sorting recycling, to the creation of safe home-care robots for the elderly to age with dignity. From tactile sensing, we can discern material properties, recognize textures, and determine softness, while with compliance, we are able to securely and safely interact with the objects and the environment around us. These two abilities can culminate into a useful soft robotic gripper, such as the original GelSight Fin Ray, which is able to grasp a large variety of different objects and also perform a simple household manipulation task: wine glass reorientation. Although the original GelSight Fin Ray solves the problem of interfacing a generally rigid, high-resolution sensor with a soft, compliant structure, we can improve the robustness of the sensor and implement techniques that make such camera-based tactile sensors applicable to a wider variety of soft robot designs. We first integrate flexible mirrors and incorporate the rigid electronic components into the base of the gripper, which greatly improves the compliance of the Fin Ray structure. Then, we synthesize a flexible and high-elongation silicone adhesive-based fluorescent paint, which can provide good quality 2D tactile localization results for our sensor. Finally, we incorporate all of these techniques into a new design: the Baby Fin Ray, which we use to dig through clutter, and perform successful classification of nuts in their shells. The supplementary video can be found here: https://youtu.be/_oD_QFtYTPM
Comment: Accepted to IEEE Conference of Soft Robotics (RoboSoft) 2023