DIGIT

DIGIT 视触觉传感器Common

Meta's open-source, fingertip-sized, low-cost vision-based tactile sensor that reads contact from a camera watching a gel deform.

DIGIT is a vision-based tactile sensor open-sourced by Facebook AI Research (now Meta FAIR) and published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters in 2020. It works like GelSight: an internal camera shoots through a layer of elastic gel, and when an object presses against it, the gel's deformation is captured in an image that records the shape and texture of the contact area, forming a ‘tactile image.’ It's small, cheap, and easy to manufacture, making it well suited to the fingertips of a multi-fingered dexterous hand — the paper demonstrates it being used to roll a glass marble around in a hand. In 2021, Meta announced a partnership with GelSight to mass-produce it, and open-sourced the tactile library PyTouch and the simulator TACTO alongside it; a newer generation is called Digit 360. Note that it shares its name only, with no other connection, with Digit, the humanoid robot made by Agility Robotics.

ExampleMounting one DIGIT on each of a gripper's two fingers: during a grasp, the position of the contact region in the tactile image shows whether the object is held straight, and the gel's shear deformation gives early warning that the object is about to slip.

Also called: Meta DIGIT, DIGIT Tactile Sensor
Related: Vision-Based Tactile Sensor · GelSight · Digit 360 · TACTO: A Fast, Flexible, and Open-source Simulator for High-Resolution Vision-based Tactile Sensors · Tactile Image · Agility Robotics Digit
Sources: DIGIT: A Novel Design for a Low-Cost Compact High-Resolution Tactile Sensor (arXiv 2005.14679)
Meta AI: Teaching robots to perceive, understand, and interact through touch