GelSight Mini

GelSight’s commercial compact vision-based tactile sensor, ready to use over USB.

GelSight Mini is a compact vision-based tactile sensor from the company GelSight, which grew out of the GelSight technology developed in Edward Adelson’s group at MIT. A camera inside the sensor photographs how a soft silicone pad deforms under pressure, and photometric stereo recovers the contact surface’s 3D shape; when the gel surface carries markers, tracking their displacement can estimate shear force and slip. The company describes it as the first commercial tactile sensor with spatial resolution exceeding human touch. According to the official GitHub, it uses a single USB 3 cable for both power and data, runs at 25 FPS, and ships with Python examples for 3D point cloud reconstruction and marker tracking. It’s compact, priced for researchers and hobbyists, and suits mounting directly on a gripper fingertip — one of the most commonly used vision-based tactile sensors in labs.

ExampleMounting two GelSight Mini sensors on the two fingertips of a parallel gripper lets you watch the contact region and marker displacement in the tactile image after picking up an object, to judge whether it is starting to slip.

Related

GelSight · Vision-Based Tactile Sensor · Photometric Stereo · Marker Tracking · Tactile Image · Slip Detection

Sources

GelSight Mini 官方产品页 (Chinese)
gelsightinc/gsrobotics GitHub（Mini SDK 与 FAQ） (Chinese)

As of

2026-09