Tactile perception stands as a critical sensory modality for human interaction with the environment. Among various tactile sensor techniques, optical sensor-based approaches have gained traction, notably for producing high-resolution tactile images. This work explores gel elastomer deformation simulation through a physics-based approach. While previous works in this direction usually adopt the explicit material point method (MPM), which has certain limitations in force simulation and rendering, we adopt the finite element method (FEM) and address the challenges in penetration and mesh distortion with incremental potential contact (IPC) method. As a result, we present a simulator named TacIPC, which can ensure numerically stable simulations while accommodating direct rendering and friction modeling. To evaluate TacIPC, we conduct three tasks: pseudo-image quality assessment, deformed geometry estimation, and marker displacement prediction. These tasks show its superior efficacy in reducing the sim-to-real gap. Our method can also seamlessly integrate with existing simulators. More experiments and videos can be found in the supplementary materials and on the website: https://sites.google.com/view/tac-ipc.

翻译：触觉感知是人类与环境交互的关键感官模态。在众多触觉传感器技术中，基于光学传感器的方案因能生成高分辨率触觉图像而日益受到关注。本研究通过基于物理的方法探索凝胶弹性体变形仿真。以往相关研究通常采用显式物质点法（MPM），该方法在力仿真与渲染方面存在一定局限性；我们则采用有限元法（FEM），并利用增量势接触（IPC）方法解决穿透与网格畸变问题。由此，我们提出了名为TacIPC的仿真器，该仿真器在保障数值稳定性的同时支持直接渲染与摩擦建模。为评估TacIPC，我们开展了三项任务：伪图像质量评估、变形几何估计以及标记点位移预测。这些任务表明，该方法在缩小仿真-现实差距方面具有显著优势。我们的方法还可与现有仿真器无缝集成。更多实验及视频详见补充材料及网站：https://sites.google.com/view/tac-ipc。