They See Me Rolling: High-Speed Event Vision-Based Tactile Roller Sensor for Large Surface Inspection

Inspecting large-scale industrial surfaces like aircraft fuselages for quality control requires precise, high-resolution 3-D geometry. Vision-based tactile sensors (VBTSs) offer high local resolution but require slow 'press-and-lift' measurements for large areas. Sliding or roller/belt VBTS designs provide continuous measurement but face significant challenges: sliding suffers from friction/wear, while both are speed-limited by camera frame rates and motion blur. Thus, a rapid, continuous, high-resolution method is needed. In this article, we introduce a novel neuromorphic tactile roller sensor. It uses a modified event-based multiview stereo (EMVS) algorithm for 3-D reconstruction, leveraging high temporal resolution and motion blur robustness. This reconstruction is most effective for surfaces with distinct edges or sharp features, which are often the most critical for defect detection in industrial inspection tasks. We demonstrate 0.5 m/s scanning speeds with MAE below 100 μm (11× faster than prior methods). A multireference Bayesian fusion strategy reduces MAE by 25.2% (versus EMVS) and mitigates curvature errors. We also validate high-speed Braille reading 2.6× faster than previous approaches.