A Novel Vision-Based Tactile Sensor Using Lamination and Gilding Process for Improvement of Outdoor Detection and Maintainability

This article presents a novel vision-based tactile sensor (VBTS) using a pioneering process route to solve the problem of high process cost and low maintainability. We adopt the acrylic double-sided adhesive to prepare a high-quality elastomer through the lamination process and the metal foil to fabricate a semimirror coating through the gilding process. Our scheme does not rely on any equipment enabling hardware to be fabricated or replaced manually both indoors and outdoors. Compared with the current preparation schemes, the preparation/repair of an elastomer and coating takes only 10/5 min and costs only 0.055/0.035 USD. Through imaging tests, the foil can obtain high-resolution tactile mapping comparable to that of representative VBTSs. Depending on the high-efficiency preparation, we leverage cost advantages to compensate for the lack of elastomer and coating durability. This work also explores the feasibility of outdoor detection. We apply it to detect fossils for the first time and establish a deep-learning model that achieves 100% accuracy in identifying six kinds of paleontological and plant fossils. The results show that our sensor has potential application in outdoor detection.