Patent ID: 7420155

Claim:
An optical tactile sensor comprising: a sensing part comprising a transparent elastic body and a plurality of marker groups provided in said body, each marker group being comprised of a number of colored markers, with markers constituting different marker groups having different colors for each group, said transparent elastic body having an arbitrarily curved surface to be contacted by an object; a photographing device for taking an image of behavior of colored markers when said arbitrarily curved surface of said transparent elastic body is contacted by the object to obtain image information of markers, and a force vector distribution reconstructing device including a transfer function by which a force vector applied to the arbitrarily curved surface is reconstructed from information as to the behavior of markers that is obtained from the image information of the colored markers, said force vector distribution reconstructing device reconstructing forces applied to said arbitrarily curved surface from said information as to the behavior of markers by using the transfer function wherein said transfer function is obtained by measurement or simulation; wherein said transfer function is obtained from information as to behavior of markers when forces having predetermined magnitude in predetermined directions are applied to sampling points arranged on the arbitrarily curved surface.