  The synthesis of tactile sensing with compliance is essential to many fields,
from agricultural usages like fruit picking, to sustainability practices such
as sorting recycling, to the creation of safe home-care robots for the elderly
to age with dignity. From tactile sensing, we can discern material properties,
recognize textures, and determine softness, while with compliance, we are able
to securely and safely interact with the objects and the environment around us.
These two abilities can culminate into a useful soft robotic gripper, such as
the original GelSight Fin Ray, which is able to grasp a large variety of
different objects and also perform a simple household manipulation task: wine
glass reorientation. Although the original GelSight Fin Ray solves the problem
of interfacing a generally rigid, high-resolution sensor with a soft, compliant
structure, we can improve the robustness of the sensor and implement techniques
that make such camera-based tactile sensors applicable to a wider variety of
soft robot designs. We first integrate flexible mirrors and incorporate the
rigid electronic components into the base of the gripper, which greatly
improves the compliance of the Fin Ray structure. Then, we synthesize a
flexible and high-elongation silicone adhesive-based fluorescent paint, which
can provide good quality 2D tactile localization results for our sensor.
Finally, we incorporate all of these techniques into a new design: the Baby Fin
Ray, which we use to dig through clutter, and perform successful classification
of nuts in their shells. The supplementary video can be found here:
https://youtu.be/_oD_QFtYTPM
