HydroShear: Hydroelastic Shear Simulation for Tactile Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning

HydroShear is a hydroelastic tactile simulator that models stick‑slip transitions, path‑dependent force and shear buildup, and full SE(3) object‑sensor interactions. It uses Signed Distance Functions to track indenter displacements on a sensor membrane, producing physics‑based force fields from arbitrary watertight geometries while remaining engine‑agnostic. Experiments on GelSight Minis show HydroShear reproduces real tactile shear more faithfully than existing methods, enabling zero‑shot sim‑to‑real reinforcement learning with a 93% success rate across four dexterous tasks.