BioTac

SynTouch’s biomimetic fingertip tactile sensor, which senses contact force, micro-vibration, and temperature.

BioTac is a fingertip-shaped tactile sensor from the US company SynTouch, developed out of biomimetic tactile research by Gerald Loeb’s group (Wettels, Fishel, and others). Its structure is a rigid core wrapped in a rubber skin, with conductive liquid filling the space between; the core’s surface carries 19 sensing electrodes and 4 excitation electrodes, and when something makes contact, the liquid layer deforms and each electrode’s voltage changes accordingly, from which contact location, force magnitude, and direction can be inferred. It can also sense micro-vibration and temperature — the former is useful for recognizing texture and detecting slip, the latter for telling materials apart. BioTac was long a high-end benchmark in robot tactile research, commonly mounted on dexterous-hand fingertips, and it built up public datasets on slip direction and grasp stability. Its drawback is that the relationship between electrode signals and deformation is complex and hard to interpret — an NVIDIA paper in 2021 built a model specifically to address this. According to a 2024 paper, the sensor has since been discontinued, which has made these datasets hard to keep using.

ExampleThe BioTac SP slip-direction dataset mounts BioTac on a robotic fingertip and records electrode signals during grasping, used to train a model that judges which direction an object is sliding.

Also called

SynTouch BioTac, BioTac SP

Related

Tactile Sensor · Slip Detection · Electronic Skin · Vision-Based Tactile Sensor · GelSight · Dexterous Hand

Sources

Interpreting and Predicting Tactile Signals for the SynTouch BioTac (NVIDIA, arXiv:2101.05452)
ACROSS: A Deformation-Based Cross-Modal Representation for Robotic Tactile Perception (arXiv:2411.08533)

As of

2024-11