Event
HydroShear tactile simulator accepted to RSS 2026
1 reports · 1 sources
An Dang et al. propose HydroShear, a non-holonomic-constraint hydroelastic tactile simulator, to address tactile sim-to-real policy transfer for contact-intensive tasks; the work was accepted to RSS 2026. HydroShear models stick-slip transitions, path-dependent force and shear accumulation, and full SE(3) object-sensor interaction, and can generate force fields from arbitrary watertight geometries. In GelSight Mini sensor experiments, the authors report that HydroShear reproduces real tactile shear more faithfully than existing methods, achieving zero-shot sim-to-real policy transfer on four tasks—peg insertion, bin packing, book shelving, and drawer pulling—with an average success rate of 93%, higher than policies trained on tactile images (34%) and other shear simulation methods (58%–61%).
Report timeline
- HydroShear: Fluid-elastic shear simulation for tactile sim-to-real reinforcement learning
HydroShear is a non-holonomic fluid-elastic tactile simulator accepted to RSS 2026, addressing tactile sim-to-real policy transfer for contact-intensive tasks. It models stick-slip transitions, path-dependent force and shear accumulation, and full SE(3) object-sensor interaction, and uses signed distance functions (SDFs) to track the displacement of indenter surface points as they interact with the sensor membrane, generating physically grounded and computationally efficient force fields from arbitrary watertight geometries.
arXiv cs.RO ·