To connect sight and touch, the (MIT) CSAIL engineers worked with a KUKA robot arm, a type often used in industrial warehouses. The scientists outfitted it with a special tactile sensor called GelSight—a slab of transparent, synthetic rubber that works as an imaging system. Objects are pressed into GelSight, and then cameras surrounding the slab monitor the impressions.
With a common webcam, the CSAIL team recorded almost 200 objects, including tools, household products, and fabrics being touched by the robot arm over 12,000 times. That created a trove of video clips that the team could break down into 3 million static images, creating a dataset they termed “VisGel.”
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