Related papers: Leveraging Robotic Prior Tactile Exploratory Actio…

Robots which interact with the physical world will benefit from a fine-grained tactile understanding of objects and surfaces. Additionally, for certain tasks, robots may need to know the haptic properties of an object before touching it. To…

Humans display the remarkable ability to sense the world through tools and other held objects. For example, we are able to pinpoint impact locations on a held rod and tell apart different textures using a rigid probe. In this work, we…

Whole-arm tactile sensing enables a robot to sense contact and infer contact properties across its entire arm. Within this paper, we demonstrate that using data-driven methods, a humanoid robot can infer mechanical properties of objects…

Touch sensing can help robots understand their sur- rounding environment, and in particular the objects they interact with. To this end, roboticists have, in the last few decades, developed several tactile sensing solutions, extensively…

Inferring physical properties can significantly enhance robotic manipulation by enabling robots to handle objects safely and efficiently through adaptive grasping strategies. Previous approaches have typically relied on either tactile or…

Robots operating in an open world will encounter novel objects with unknown physical properties, such as mass, friction, or size. These robots will need to sense these properties through interaction prior to performing downstream tasks with…

General robot manipulation requires the handling of previously unseen objects. Learning a physically accurate model at test time can provide significant benefits in data efficiency, predictability, and reuse between tasks. Tactile sensing…

Humans leverage multiple sensor modalities when interacting with objects and discovering their intrinsic properties. Using the visual modality alone is insufficient for deriving intuition behind object properties (e.g., which of two boxes…

Tactile perception is profoundly influenced by the surface properties of objects in contact. However, despite their crucial role in shaping tactile experiences, these material characteristics have been largely neglected in existing tactile…

The sense of touch plays a key role in enabling humans to understand and interact with surrounding environments. For robots, tactile sensing is also irreplaceable. While interacting with objects, tactile sensing provides useful information…

For humans, the process of grasping an object relies heavily on rich tactile feedback. Most recent robotic grasping work, however, has been based only on visual input, and thus cannot easily benefit from feedback after initiating contact.…

Tactile sensing is a widely-studied means of implicit communication between robot and human. In this paper, we investigate how tactile sensing can help bridge differences between robotic embodiments in the context of collaborative…

In this work, we introduce the problem of cross-modal visuo-tactile object recognition with robotic active exploration. With this term, we mean that the robot observes a set of objects with visual perception and, later on, it is able to…

Intricate behaviors an organism can exhibit is predicated on its ability to sense and effectively interpret complexities of its surroundings. Relevant information is often distributed between multiple modalities, and requires the organism…

Humans learn about objects via interaction and using multiple perceptions, such as vision, sound, and touch. While vision can provide information about an object's appearance, non-visual sensors, such as audio and haptics, can provide…

To use robots in more unstructured environments, we have to accommodate for more complexities. Robotic systems need more awareness of the environment to adapt to uncertainty and variability. Although cameras have been predominantly used in…

The mechanisms of infant development are far from understood. Learning about one's own body is likely a foundation for subsequent development. Here we look specifically at the problem of how spontaneous touches to the body in early infancy…

Autonomously exploring the unknown physical properties of novel objects such as stiffness, mass, center of mass, friction coefficient, and shape is crucial for autonomous robotic systems operating continuously in unstructured environments.…

With the development of robot electronic skin technology, various tactile sensors, enhanced by AI, are unlocking a new dimension of perception for robots. In this work, we explore how robots equipped with electronic skin can recognize…

Predicting the outcomes of robotic actions, often referred to as learning a world model, in complex environments remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. Existing approaches primarily rely on visual observations and action inputs to…