AllTact Fin Ray: A Compliant Robot Gripper with Omni-Directional Tactile Sensing

Abstract: Tactile sensing plays a crucial role in robot grasping and manipulation by providing essential contact information between the robot and the environment. In this paper, we present AllTact Fin Ray, a novel compliant gripper design with omni-directional and local tactile sensing capabilities. The finger body is unibody-casted using transparent elastic silicone, and a camera positioned at the base of the finger captures the deformation of the whole body and the contact face. Due to the global deformation of the adaptive structure, existing vision-based tactile sensing approaches that assume constant illumination are no longer applicable. To address this, we propose a novel sensing method where the global deformation is first reconstructed from the image using edge features and spatial constraints. Then, detailed contact geometry is computed from the brightness difference against a dynamically retrieved reference image. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed gripper design and sensing method in contact detection, force estimation, object grasping, and precise manipulation.