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Hi @csullivan107:
This error seems to indicate you’re still missing a package. It must have slipped through at some point during your installation. Try compiling again after installing it:
sudo apt install qtwebengine5-devBest
*edit*: I’m assuming that this will be the missing package, but in the package manager from Ubuntu there are several others available that are in some way related and potentially relevant: libqt5webengine5, libqt5webenginecore5, etc. (just search for them)
*edit2*: This answer is valid if you have installed Qt5 using the package manager. If you downloaded and installed Qt5 manually you should use the update tool of the installation!
Hello @adamzhang, I happen to work on tactile sensing (more generally mechanosensing, actually) and use SOFA to simulate the behavior of my tactile sensor. My sensor is made of silicone, a material that has good properties to be simulated with help of the FEM.
On the one hand, from my experience, I would say that it is possible to simulate realistic deformations and even complex contact patterns for tactile sensing within SOFA. On the other hand I think that getting realistic behavior in terms of hysteresis and such would be tricky at least. To achieve this would be rather interesting research results, I think.
I have question: what type of sensing do you want to simulate? What is the level of detail you are interest in? If you think about the typical resistive sensors you should consider that the signal is related to the surface area of the conductive, compressible material making contact with the electrodes, which is a function of the deformation. So, even if you know the deformation using SOFA it might not be possible to directly predict the sensor value super accurately. I’ve never attempted this, but this is my intuition. If you think about capacitive sensors it is a similarly difficult challenge. To accurately predict the signals of each cell you would have to find the distance between the electrodes in each cell, which changes as the material in between them gets compressed. SOFA could handle the simulation of the deformation, I think, but it would require looking at things at very different scales: the sensor array as a whole, which is comprised of several (deformable) layers as well as each cell with compressible material between the electrodes.
Maybe you are more interested in obtaining a prediction of what contact pattern a contact situation produces, i.e. something that could be used for a transfer-learning approach to train a grasping algorithm offline for instance? Like I said above, SOFA might help you, but in that case I think its worth looking more deeply into the contact handling than the details of how exactly material is deformed. This is because, in my opinion, tactile sensors are usually designed to be deformed in a limited manner, i.e. we observe compressions of at most a few millimeters before saturation.
Well, I hope this helps. If you can give more details of what you want to do I could try to give you a more specific answer on whether SOFA will help you with your task.
Best
Stefan
