What is Tactile Sensor Data?
Tactile Sensor Data — contact measurements from a robot's fingertips or skin: pressure, force and, in optical sensors, images of the contact itself.
There are two families. Force-based sensors report numbers — normal force, sometimes shear — with fingertip versions usually rated in the single-digit to low-tens-of-newtons range. Optical tactile sensors such as GelSight and DIGIT put a camera behind a soft gel, so contact deforms the gel and the sensor returns a small image, often a few hundred pixels on a side, at tens of hertz.
That image is what makes the data useful and awkward at once. It shows slip, texture and the moment of contact directly, but the gel wears, readings drift as it ages, and the same object pressed twice does not produce identical images. Calibration between sensor and fingertip, and a replacement schedule for the gel, are part of any serious collection.
Because the sensor is mounted on the gripper, tactile data rarely transfers between platforms — a set collected on one hand is a reference for that hand, not a drop-in for another. It is nearly always collected to order, and the brief names the sensor, the objects and the force range before anything is recorded.
Related terms
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Dexterous Hand Data
Dexterous Hand Data — demonstrations for multi-fingered robot hands, including in-hand manipulation that a two-finger gripper cannot do.
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Grasping Data
Grasping Data — images, depth maps or point clouds of objects, annotated with the gripper poses that would pick each one up.
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Robot Gripper Data
Robot Gripper Data — episodes and signals tied to the end effector: width, force, vacuum pressure and whether the grasp held.
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