Visual Tactile Sensor based on Feature Tracking of Patterns for Soft Human-Machine Interaction

Tactile sensors are used in various fields such as automated factories and human collaboration. Tactile sensors exist in a variety of technological ways. In particular, most of the contact determination methods are mainly performed through the detection of the physical surface. In contrast, recently, various Vision-based tactile sensors that can replace the existing method based only on visual data from an image viewed through a camera sensor have been proposed. The hardware proposed in this paper is also a Vision-based tactile sensor, and it is a method that determines contact based only on patterns. In addition, we propose a vision-based tactile sensor as hardware in the form of air bag based on an air cushion. As the biggest feature of the Vision-based tactile sensor is estimation through image reading, it is easy to update various functions through algorithm improvement. Based on these points, through continuous research, we will develop algorithms for position estimation stability improvement, force estimation, and multi-touch discrimination, among at the possibility of application to fields such as cooperative human interaction robots.