Development of a Vacuum Suction Microcup Array Featuring Visionbased Tactile Sensing for Robotic Manipulation - Characterization of a Tri-Axial Force Distribution Sensor -

This paper reports a tri-axial force distribution sensor that combines a vision based tactile sensor with micro suction cup array. The proposed device has two functions. Estimation of tri-axial force distribution and suctionassisted grasping of challenging objects such as coins or medicine pills. The device consists of a Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) micro suction cup array and a camera. The camera captures the deformation of the suction cups from the backside. A convolutional neural network (CNN) was used to estimate tri-axial force applied to each suction cup from the captured images to obtain force distribution. As a result, the sensor's force resolutions in the XYZ directions were 3.4 mN, 2.4 mN, and 10.0 mN.