The synthesis of tactile sensing with compliance is essential to many fields, from agricultural usages like fruit picking, to sustainability practices such as sorting recycling, to the creation of safe home-care robots for the elderly to age with dignity. From tactile sensing, we can discern material properties, recognize textures, and determine softness, while with compliance, we are able to securely and safely interact with the objects and the environment around us. These two abilities can culminate into a useful soft robotic gripper, such as the original GelSight Fin Ray, which is able to grasp a large variety of different objects and also perform a simple household manipulation task: wine glass reorientation. Although the original GelSight Fin Ray solves the problem of interfacing a generally rigid, high-resolution sensor with a soft, compliant structure, we can improve the robustness of the sensor and implement techniques that make such camera-based tactile sensors applicable to a wider variety of soft robot designs. We first integrate flexible mirrors and incorporate the rigid electronic components into the base of the gripper, which greatly improves the compliance of the Fin Ray structure. Then, we synthesize a flexible and high-elongation silicone adhesive-based fluorescent paint, which can provide good quality 2D tactile localization results for our sensor. Finally, we incorporate all of these techniques into a new design: the Baby Fin Ray, which we use to dig through clutter, and perform successful classification of nuts in their shells. The supplementary video can be found here: https://youtu.be/_oD_QFtYTPM

翻译：触觉感知与柔顺性的结合对于众多领域至关重要，从农业用途（如水果采摘）到可持续发展实践（如垃圾分类回收），再到为老年人创造有尊严地安享晚年的安全家庭护理机器人。通过触觉感知，我们可以辨别材料特性、识别纹理并确定柔软度，而借助柔顺性，我们能够安全可靠地与环境中的物体交互。这两种能力融合后可形成实用的软体机器人夹爪，例如原始GelSight Fin Ray，它能够抓握多种不同物体，并执行一项简单的家庭操作任务——葡萄酒杯的重新定向。尽管原始GelSight Fin Ray解决了将通常刚性的高分辨率传感器与柔性顺结构结合的问题，但我们仍可提升传感器的鲁棒性，并引入技术，使此类基于摄像头的触觉传感器适用于更广泛的软体机器人设计。首先，我们集成柔性反射镜，并将刚性电子元件整合到夹爪基座中，从而大幅提升了Fin Ray结构的柔顺性。其次，我们合成了一种基于硅胶粘合剂的柔性高伸长率荧光涂料，可为传感器提供高质量的二维触觉定位结果。最后，我们将所有这些技术整合到新设计——Baby Fin Ray中，利用它可在杂乱环境中进行搜寻，并成功完成带壳坚果的分类任务。补充视频见：https://youtu.be/_oD_QFtYTPM