  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
multimodal vision-based tactile sensor, SATac, which can simultaneously
perceive information of temperature, pressure, and shear. SATac utilizes
thermoluminescence of strontium aluminate (SA) to sense a wide range of
temperatures with exceptional resolution. Additionally, the pressure and shear
can also be perceived by analyzing 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.
