A tactile perception method with flexible grating structural color

Affordable high-resolution cameras and state-of-the-art computer vision techniques have led to the emergence of various vision-based tactile sensors. However, current vision-based tactile sensors mainly depend on geometric optics or marker tracking for tactile assessments, resulting in limited performance. To solve this dilemma, we introduce optical interference patterns as the visual representation of tactile information for flexible tactile sensors. We propose a novel tactile perception method and its corresponding sensor, combining structural colors from flexible blazed gratings with deep learning. The richer structural colors and finer data processing foster the tactile estimation performance. The proposed sensor has an overall normal force magnitude accuracy of 6 mN, a planar resolution of 79 μm and a contact-depth resolution of 25 μm. This work presents a promising tactile method that combines wave optics, soft materials and machine learning. It performs well in tactile measurement, and can be expanded into multiple sensing fields.