SATac: A Thermoluminescence Enabled Tactile Sensor for Concurrent Perception of Temperature, Pressure, and Shear

Most vision-based tactile sensors use elastomer deformation to infer tactile information, which can not sense some modalities, like temperature. As an important part of human tactile perception, temperature sensing can help robots better interact with the environment. In this work, we propose a novel multi-modal vision-based tactile sensor, SATac, which can simultaneously perceive information on temperature, pressure, and shear. SATac utilizes the thermoluminescence of strontium aluminate to sense a wide range of temperatures with exceptional resolution. Additionally, the pressure and shear can also be perceived by analyzing the Voronoi diagram. A series of experiments are conducted to verify the performance of our proposed sensor. We also discuss the possible application scenarios and demonstrate how SATac could benefit robot perception capabilities.