Simulation of tactile sensors using soft contacts for robot grasping applications

In the context of robot grasping and manipulation, realistic simulation requires accurate modeling of contacts between bodies and, in a practical level, accurate simulation of touch sensors. This paper addresses the problem of simulating a tactile sensor considering soft contacts and full friction description. The developed model consists of a surface contact patch described by a mesh of contact elements. For each element, a full friction description is built considering stick-slip phenomena. The developed sensor model is implemented using OpenRAVE and used to perform typical tasks related to tactile sensors. The performance of the simulated sensor is then compared to a real one. It is also demonstrated how it can be integrated on the simulation of a complete robot grasping system.