Simulation of Tactile Sensing Arrays for Physical Interaction Tasks

Simulated worlds are important enablers and accelerators of new algorithms for autonomous robot applications. A framework for tactile servoing in the simulated world is presented. This framework includes a general model of tactile sensing arrays that can simulate the behavior of a real tactile sensing array thanks to an empirical characterization procedure. After obtaining the precise sensor model, different tactile servoing schemes can be implemented in the framework by controlling contact features, including points and lines extracted from the simulated contact images. Several experiments have been performed in order to guarantee the correspondence between the simulated results generated by the framework and the real ones executed with different sensors and robots.