  Tactile sensing plays an important role in robotic perception and
manipulation tasks. To overcome the real-world limitations of data collection,
simulating tactile response in a virtual environment comes as a desirable
direction of robotic research. In this paper, we propose Elastic Interaction of
Particles (EIP) for tactile simulation. 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 the two objects. By contrast, EIP models the
tactile sensor as a group of coordinated particles, and the elastic property is
applied to regulate the deformation of particles during contact. With the
tactile simulation by EIP, we further propose a tactile-visual perception
network that enables information fusion between tactile data and visual images.
The perception network is based on a global-to-local fusion mechanism where
multi-scale tactile features are aggregated to the corresponding local region
of the visual modality with the guidance of tactile positions and directions.
The fusion method exhibits superiority regarding the 3D geometric
reconstruction task.
