Simulation is widely applied in robotics research to save time and resources.
There have been several works to simulate optical tactile sensors that leverage
either a smoothing method or Finite Element Method (FEM). However, elastomer
deformation physics is not considered in the former method, whereas the latter
requires a massive amount of computational resources like a computer cluster.
In this work, we propose a pluggable and low computational cost simulator using
the Taichi programming language for simulating optical tactile sensors, named
as Tacchi . It reconstructs elastomer deformation using particles, which allows
deformed elastomer surfaces to be rendered into tactile images and reveals
contact information without suffering from high computational costs. Tacchi
facilitates creating realistic tactile images in simulation, e.g., ones that
capture wear-and-tear defects on object surfaces. In addition, the proposed
Tacchi can be integrated with robotics simulators for a robot system
simulation. Experiment results showed that Tacchi can produce images with
better similarity to real images and achieved higher Sim2Real accuracy compared
to the existing methods. Moreover, it can be connected with MuJoCo and Gazebo
with only the requirement of 1G memory space in GPU compared to a computer
cluster applied for FEM. With Tacchi, physical robot simulation with optical
tactile sensors becomes possible. All the materials in this paper are available
at https://github.com/zixichen007115/Tacchi .Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, accepted by IEEE Robotics and Automation Letter