Related papers: Scalable Tactile Sensing for an Omni-adaptive Soft…
We aimed to develop a tactile display that allows users to actively explore the virtual texture of a surface. We developed a tactile display embedded in an optical mouse that provides a wide range of frequency vibrations to the user's…
Development of large-area, high-speed electronic skins is a grand challenge for robotics, prosthetics, and human-machine interfaces, but is fundamentally limited by wiring complexity and data bottlenecks. Here, we introduce Single-Pixel…
Tactile sensing is essential for dexterous manipulation, yet large-scale human demonstration datasets lack tactile feedback, limiting their effectiveness in skill transfer to robots. To address this, we introduce TacCap, a wearable Fiber…
Tactile sensing provides robots with rich feedback during manipulation, enabling a host of perception and controls capabilities. Here, we present a new open-source, vision-based tactile sensor designed to promote reproducibility and…
Legged locomotion benefits from embodied sensing, where perception emerges from the physical interaction between body and environment. We present a soft-surfaced, vision-based tactile foot sensor that endows a bipedal robot with a skin-like…
We propose a new robotic cover prototype that achieves thermal display while also being soft. We focus on the thermal cue because previous human studies have identified it as part of the touch pleasantness. The robotic cover surface can be…
Data-driven approaches to tactile sensing aim to overcome the complexity of accurately modeling contact with soft materials. However, their widespread adoption is impaired by concerns about data efficiency and the capability to generalize…
Soft robotics is applicable to a variety of domains due to the adaptability offered by the soft and compliant materials. To develop future intelligent soft robots, soft sensors that can capture deformation with nearly infinite…
Object insertion tasks are prone to failure under pose uncertainty and environmental variation, often requiring manual fine-tuning or controller retraining. We present a novel approach for robust and resilient object insertion using a…
Tactile sensing is important for robots to perceive the world as it captures the texture and hardness of the object in contact and is robust to illumination and colour variances. However, due to the limited sensing area and the resistance…
Continuum robots have been widely adopted in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) because of their compact size and high flexibility. However, their proprioceptive capabilities remain limited, particularly in narrow lumens,…
Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…
This paper presents a control scheme for force sensitive, gentle grasping with a Pisa/IIT anthropomorphic SoftHand equipped with a miniaturised version of the TacTip optical tactile sensor on all five fingertips. The tactile sensors provide…
Haptic sensation is an important modality for interacting with the real world. This paper proposes a general framework of inferring haptic forces on the surface of a 3D structure from internal deformations using a small number of physical…
Modular soft robots combine the strengths of two traditionally separate areas of robotics. As modular robots, they can show robustness to individual failure and reconfigurability; as soft robots, they can deform and undergo large shape…
Touch is a crucial sensing modality that provides rich information about object properties and interactions with the physical environment. Humans and robots both benefit from using touch to perceive and interact with the surrounding…
Flexible electrical impedance tomography (EIT) offers a promising alternative to traditional tactile sensing approaches, enabling low-cost, scalable, and deformable sensor designs. Here, we propose an optimized lattice-structured flexible…
In this work, we report on the integrated sensorimotor control of the Pisa/IIT SoftHand, an anthropomorphic soft robot hand designed around the principle of adaptive synergies, with the BRL tactile fingertip (TacTip), a soft biomimetic…
The images captured by vision-based tactile sensors carry information about high-resolution tactile fields, such as the distribution of the contact forces applied to their soft sensing surface. However, extracting the information encoded in…
Intelligent interaction with the physical world requires perceptual abilities beyond vision and hearing; vibrant tactile sensing is essential for autonomous robots to dexterously manipulate unfamiliar objects or safely contact humans.…