SpectraTac: A Compact Camera-Free Optical Tactile Sensor with Distributed Color Sensing

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30368v1
• Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2026 07:25:51 GMT
• Title: SpectraTac: A Compact Camera-Free Optical Tactile Sensor with Distributed Color Sensing
• Abstract summary: SpectraTac is a camera-free optical tactile sensor that combines active red-green--blue (RGB) illumination with spatially distributed color sensing.<n>The device measures 19.2 mm in diameter and 4 mm in height, with a material cost below USD5.
• Score: 11.324752834280616
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Tactile sensing is essential for physical interaction in robotics and human--machine systems. However, combining rich tactile information with compact hardware, low cost, and low computational overhead remains challenging. This work presents SpectraTac, a compact, camera-free optical tactile sensor that combines active red--green--blue (RGB) illumination with spatially distributed color sensing. Contact deforms a compliant transparent elastomer and modulates its internal light field, producing spatially differentiated changes in color and intensity. Three distributed color sensors capture these responses as low-dimensional spatio-spectral features, avoiding cameras, imaging optics, and high-dimensional image processing. The device measures 19.2 mm in diameter and 4 mm in height, with a material cost below USD~5. A data-driven decoding framework simultaneously estimates three-dimensional (3D) force and the contact region from the optical measurements. For 3D force prediction, the sensor achieved mean absolute errors (MAEs) of 0.161, 0.164, and 0.429 N along the x-, y-, and z-axes, respectively. The nine-region contact-classification accuracy was 99.9%. We further evaluated real-time 3D force tracking and contact-region-based human--machine interaction through an interactive control task. These results indicate that distributed color-resolved optical sensing offers a compact, low-cost alternative to camera-based tactile sensing for robotics, wearable sensing, and interactive systems.

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