Tactile sensing plays an important role in robotic perception and manipulation. To overcome the real-world limitations of data collection, simulating tactile response in virtual environment comes as a desire direction of robotic research. Most existing works model the tactile sensor as a rigid multi-body, which is incapable of reflecting the elastic property of the tactile sensor as well as characterizing the fine-grained physical interaction between two objects. In this paper, we propose Elastic Interaction of Particles (EIP), a novel framework for tactile emulation. At its core, EIP models the tactile sensor as a group of coordinated particles, and the elastic theory is applied to regulate the deformation of particles during the contact process. The implementation of EIP is conducted from scratch, without resorting to any existing physics engine. Experiments to verify the effectiveness of our method have been carried out on two applications: robotic perception with tactile data and 3D geometric reconstruction by tactile-visual fusion. It is possible to open up a new vein for robotic tactile simulation, and contribute to various downstream robotic tasks.

中文翻译：

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用于机器人触觉仿真的粒子弹性相互作用

触觉在机器人的感知和操纵中起着重要的作用。为了克服现实世界中数据收集的局限性，在虚拟环境中模拟触觉响应已成为机器人研究的一个方向。现有的大多数工作都将触觉传感器建模为刚性的多体模型，这既不能反映出触觉传感器的弹性，又无法表征两个物体之间的细粒度物理相互作用。在本文中，我们提出了粒子的弹性相互作用（EIP），一种新型的触觉仿真框架。EIP的核心是将触觉传感器建模为一组协调的粒子，并运用弹性理论来调节接触过程中粒子的变形。EIP的实施是从头开始的，无需借助任何现有的物理引擎。已在两个应用程序上进行了验证我们方法有效性的实验：带有触觉数据的机器人感知和通过触觉-视觉融合进行3D几何重构。可以为机器人的触觉仿真开辟一条新的道路，并为各种下游机器人任务做出贡献。