MoiréSkin: Ultra-Sensitive Sensor-Actuator Visuo-Tactile Skin using Moiré Patterns

Abstract

Robots increasingly must perform dexterous object manipulation in real-world environments, yet existing VTS offer rich camera-based spatial readout while rigid optics limit force sensitivity, force range, and active compliance regulation. We present MoiréSkin, an inflatable visuo-tactile skin using flexible Moiré optics to unify ultra-sensitive tactile sensing and active compliance regulation. Dual-sided submillimeter gratings in a soft membrane amplify microscopic contact-induced strain into large, high-contrast Moiré fringe variations for tactile readout. To balance reliability and sensitivity, our tailored soft-material grating pipeline combines internal illumination with fluorescent doping to suppress ambient-light interference. Self-supervised calibration compensates for air-pressure-dependent sensing drift during pneumatic regulation, while a neural pipeline uses pre- and post-contact fringes to estimate contact position and force. Experiments show that MoiréSkin achieves 0.094 mm position and 0.0038 N contact force MAE, outperforming prior VTS by an order of magnitude. It also reaches 99.7% 10-shot classification accuracy over 7 ultra-soft materials spanning 8.73–21.72 kPa Young's modulus, and measures shear-force-related liquid mass variation with ~4 g precision, demonstrating a new path toward ultra-sensitive sensor-actuator visuo-tactile skins.