Thanks to recent advancements in the development of inexpensive, high-resolution tactile sensors, touch sensing has become popular in contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks. With the surge of data-driven methods and their requirement for substantial datasets, several methods of simulating tactile sensors have emerged in the tactile research community to overcome real-world data collection limitations. These simulation approaches can be split into two main categories: fast but inaccurate (soft) point-contact models and slow but accurate finite element modeling. In this work, we present a novel approach to simulating pressure-based tactile sensors using the hydroelastic contact model, which provides a high degree of physical realism at a reasonable computational cost. This model produces smooth contact forces for soft-to-soft and soft-to-rigid contacts along even non-convex contact surfaces. Pressure values are approximated at each point of the contact surface and can be integrated to calculate sensor outputs. We validate our models' capacity to synthesize real-world tactile data by conducting zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of a model for object state estimation. Our simulation is available as a plug-in to our open-source, MuJoCo-based simulator.

翻译：得益于低成本、高分辨率触觉传感器开发的最新进展，触觉传感在接触密集的机器人操作任务中日益普及。随着数据驱动方法的兴起及其对大规模数据集的需求，触觉研究领域已出现多种触觉传感器仿真方法，以克服现实世界数据采集的局限性。这些仿真方法主要可分为两类：快速但不精确的（软）点接触模型，以及缓慢但精确的有限元建模。本研究提出一种基于水弹性接触模型的压力式触觉传感器仿真新方法，该方法在合理计算成本下实现了高度的物理真实感。该模型能为软-软接触和软-刚体接触沿非凸接触表面生成平滑的接触力。通过近似计算接触表面各点的压力值，可进一步积分得到传感器输出。我们通过物体状态估计模型的零样本仿真到现实迁移实验，验证了所提模型合成真实触觉数据的能力。本仿真器作为插件集成于我们基于MuJoCo的开源仿真平台中。