{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/hydroelastictouch-simulation-of-tactile","title":"HydroelasticTouch: Simulation of Tactile Sensors with Hydroelastic Contact Surfaces","arxiv_id":"2501.08077","date":"2025-01-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["David P. Leins","Florian Patzelt","Robert Haschke"],"abstract":"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08077v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08077v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"hydroelastictouch-simulation-of-tactile","repo_url":"https://github.com/ubi-agni/mujoco_contact_surfaces","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}