Multimodal simulationExpert
TouchTherm: Building Multimodal Digital Twins of Objects for Tactile and Thermal Rendering
TouchTherm is a preprint framework that turns real objects into simulation-ready digital twins combining a coarse visual mesh, registered tactile micro-height fields, and a physics-regularized dynamic thermal field. On 20 objects it predicts held-out surface temperature with MAE 0.465°C at 30 s and 0.592°C at 45 s, and improves synthetic-to-real tactile object recognition from 20.0% to 34.0% Top-1 accuracy over coarse geometry. The work matters because it closes part of the simulation-to-real gap for contact-rich robotics and VR by making tactile and thermal cues queryable in simulation.