Robot Skin

Individual Tactile Sensor

We provide tactile sensing prefabs in Unity assets. Named as ForceSensingPoint . These prefabs can be distributed on robot arms as desired to simulate robot skin. Also, users can mount them wherever they want to sense the contact.

You can find these force sensor points by searching in the Project window. They are located under RCareWorld/Assets/Prefabs/Skin

Distributed Tactile Sensor as the Robot Skin

The individual sensors can be mounted on the surfaces of the robots

We provide an example of how to mount the sensors on a kinova robot arm under RCareWorld/Assets/Prefabs/Skin , named kinova_gen3_tactile_robotiq85.prefab

Registering the force sensors

Click CareTool/PointHelper , every tactile sensor (the object with a red line) will be assigned with an ID and registered to the communicator.

Set up Softbody Force calculation

In the scene, add an empty object, and attach the SoftBodyForce to it.

Drag the soft body that you want the robot to be in contact with to Softbody. You can leave the rest blank.

Access data in Python

Here’s an example of how to have access to the data. Notice: this is not the actual code.

env = RCareWorld()
skin = env.create_skin(<SKIN_ID>)
while 1:
	env._step()
	print(skin.getInfo())

# You can also get the sensory information by the IDs of the single taxels
# This method returns a dict with force, position, and id
data = skin.getInfoByID(<Taxel_ID>)

To interact with the code and example scene,

In Python, run pyrcareworld/Examples/example_robot_skin.py .

$ python example_robot_skin.py
pybullet build time: May 20 2022 19:44:17
Side channel id in use:
534c891e-810f-11ea-a9d0-822485860400
d587efc8-9eb7-11ec-802a-18c04d443e7d
09bfcf57-9120-43dc-99f8-abeeec59df0f
02ac5776-6a7c-54e4-011d-b4c4723831c9