GelSight

Common

A vision-based tactile sensor that reads touch from a camera watching an elastic gel deform, also the name of the company that makes it.

GelSight is a family of vision-based tactile sensors: a piece of elastic gel with a reflective coating on its surface is lit from different directions by internal LEDs, and a camera on the back photographs how the gel deforms under pressure, using photometric stereo — inferring surface orientation from how shading changes under different lighting directions — to reconstruct the 3D shape of the contact surface. The approach originated in Edward Adelson's group at MIT, first appearing in a 2009 CVPR paper by Micah Johnson and Adelson; later versions added marker dots to the gel's surface, tracking their movement to measure shear force and slip. GelSight is also the name of the company that spun out of this research (GelSight Inc., based in Waltham, Massachusetts), whose products include the robotics-focused GelSight Mini (which supports ROS/ROS 2 and PyTouch) and industrial measurement products such as Mobile and Modulus. DIGIT, GelSlim, and 9DTact all follow the same ‘camera watching a gel’ approach.

ExampleMounting a GelSight Mini on a gripper's fingertip to pick up a screw, the tactile image clearly shows the imprint of the screw's threads, letting you judge which way the screw is oriented in the hand, and whether it's slipping.

Also called: GelSight Sensor, GelSight Inc.
Related: Vision-Based Tactile Sensor · GelSight Mini · DIGIT · Photometric Stereo · Marker Tracking · Tactile Image
Sources: Improved GelSight Tactile Sensor for Measuring Geometry and Slip (arXiv:1708.00922)
GelSight 官网 (Chinese)
GelSight Mini 产品页 (Chinese)
As of: 2026-09