Sim-to-Real for Robotic Tactile Sensing via Physics-Based Simulation and Learned Latent Projections

Understand

Tactile sensing is critical for robotic grasping and manipulation of objects under visual occlusion.

• However, in contrast to simulations of robot arms and cameras, current simulations of tactile sensors have limited accuracy, speed, and utility.
• In this work, we develop an efficient 3D finite element method (FEM) model of the SynTouch BioTac sensor using an open-access, GPU-based robotics simulator.
• Our simulations closely reproduce results from an experimentally-validated model in an industry-standard, CPU-based simulator, but at 75x the speed.