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Soft-bubble: A highly compliant dense geometry tactile sensor for robot manipulation

arXiv 1904.02252 ↗First posted 3 Apr 2019cs.ROcited by 15

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Abstract (arXiv)

Incorporating effective tactile sensing and mechanical compliance is key towards enabling robust and safe operation of robots in unknown, uncertain and cluttered environments. Towards realizing this goal, we present a lightweight, easy-to-build, highly compliant dense geometry sensor and end effector that comprises an inflated latex membrane with a depth sensor behind it. We present the motivations and the hardware design for this Soft-bubble and demonstrate its capabilities through example tasks including tactile-object classification, pose estimation and tracking, and nonprehensile object manipulation. We also present initial experiments to show the importance of high-resolution geometry sensing for tactile tasks and discuss applications in robust manipulation.

Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2019.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 2; 2022: 2; 2023: 4; 2024: 1; 2025: 4; 2026: 2.

15 papers.

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  1. 2023Dexterity from Touch: Self-Supervised Pre-Training of Tactile Representations with Robotic Playcited by 60
  2. 2022Visuo-Tactile Transformers for Manipulationcited by 43
  3. 2021GelSight Wedge: Measuring High-Resolution 3D Contact Geometry with a Compact Robot Fingercited by 34
  4. 2023See to Touch: Learning Tactile Dexterity through Visual Incentivescited by 33
  5. 2024ManiWAV: Learning Robot Manipulation from In-the-Wild Audio-Visual Datacited by 29
  6. 2023Neural feels with neural fields: Visuo-tactile perception for in-hand manipulationcited by 28
  7. 2022DenseTact: Optical Tactile Sensor for Dense Shape Reconstructioncited by 13
  8. 2025PolyTouch: A Robust Multi-Modal Tactile Sensor for Contact-rich Manipulation Using Tactile-Diffusion Policiescited by 13
  9. 2023AcTExplore: Active Tactile Exploration of Unknown Objectscited by 11
  10. 2021Monocular Depth Estimation for Soft Visuotactile Sensorscited by 3
  11. 2025ViTaSCOPE: Visuo-tactile Implicit Representation for In-hand Pose and Extrinsic Contact Estimationcited by 3
  12. 2026TacCoRL: Integrating Tactile Feedback into VLA via Simulationcited by 3
3 more
  1. 2025DexSkin: High-Coverage Conformable Robotic Skin for Learning Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 2
  2. 2025Cross-Sensor Touch Generationcited by 2
  3. 2026Monocular Reconstruction of Neural Tactile Fieldscited by 0