TacIPC: Intersection- and Inversion-Free FEM-Based Elastomer Simulation for Optical Tactile Sensors

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 letter 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 mesh penetration and element inversion 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 four tasks: pseudo-image quality assessment, marker displacement prediction, slip-induced rotation prediction, and deformed geometry estimation. These tasks show its superior efficacy in reducing the sim-to-real gap. Our method can also seamlessly integrate with existing simulators.