ThinTact: Thin Vision-Based Tactile Sensor by Lensless Imaging

Vision-based tactile sensors have drawn increasing interest in the robotics community. However, traditional lens-based designs impose minimum thickness constraints on these sensors, limiting their applicability in space-restricted settings. In this article, we propose ThinTact, a novel lensless vision-based tactile sensor with a sensing field of over 200 mm^2 and a thickness of less than 10 mm. ThinTact utilizes the mask-based lensless imaging technique to map the contact information to CMOS signals. To ensure real-time tactile sensing, we propose a real-time lensless reconstruction algorithm that leverages a frequency-spatial-domain joint filter based on discrete cosine transform. This algorithm achieves computation significantly faster than existing optimization-based methods. In addition, to improve the sensing quality, we develop a mask optimization method based on the generic algorithm and the corresponding system matrix calibration algorithm. We evaluate the performance of our proposed lensless reconstruction and tactile sensing through qualitative and quantitative experiments. Furthermore, we demonstrate ThinTact's practical applicability in diverse applications, including texture recognition and contact-rich object manipulation.