Related papers: Comparing Piezoresistive Substrates for Tactile Se…
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…
Robots have been brought to work close to humans in many scenarios. For coexistence and collaboration, robots should be safe and pleasant for humans to interact with. To this end, the robots could be both physically soft with multimodal…
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…
3D-printed artificial skins are a scalable approach to whole-body tactile and proximity coverage, but prior implementations have been limited to unimodal sensing and rigid materials. To improve the practical usability of 3D-printed…
Little research into tactile feet has been done for walking robots despite the benefits such feedback could give when walking on uneven terrain. This paper describes the development of a simple, robust and inexpensive tactile foot for…
Tactile sensing in soft robots remains particularly challenging because of the coupling between contact and deformation information which the sensor is subject to during actuation and interaction with the environment. This often results in…
Tactile sensing in biological organisms is deeply intertwined with morphological form, such as human fingers, cat paws, and elephant trunks, which enables rich and adaptive interactions through a variety of geometrically complex structures.…
In modern robotic applications, tactile sensor arrays (i.e., artificial skins) are an emergent solution to determine the locations of contacts between a robot and an external agent. Localizing the point of contact is useful but determining…
Reliably planning fingertip grasps for multi-fingered hands lies as a key challenge for many tasks including tool use, insertion, and dexterous in-hand manipulation. This task becomes even more difficult when the robot lacks an accurate…
Tactile sensing is critical for robotic grasping and manipulation of objects under visual occlusion. However, in contrast to simulations of robot arms and cameras, current simulations of tactile sensors have limited accuracy, speed, and…
Perceiving the environment through touch is important for robots to reach in cluttered environments, but devising a way to sense without disturbing objects is challenging. This work presents the design and modelling of whisker-inspired…
Robots operating in dynamic and shared environments benefit from anticipating contact before it occurs. We present GenTact-Prox, a fully 3D-printed artificial skin that integrates tactile and proximity sensing for contact detection and…
The tactile sensation of clothing is critical to wearer comfort. To reveal physical properties that make clothing comfortable, systematic collection of tactile data during sliding motion is required. We propose a robotic arm-based system…
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…
There is a growing need for soft robotic platforms that perform gentle, precise handling of a wide variety of objects. Existing surface-based manipulation systems, however, lack the compliance and tactile feedback needed for delicate…
In general, robotic dexterous hands are equipped with various sensors for acquiring multimodal contact information such as position, force, and pose of the grasped object. This multi-sensor-based design adds complexity to the robotic…
Tactile sensing is critical for humans to perform everyday tasks. While significant progress has been made in analyzing object grasping from vision, it remains unclear how we can utilize tactile sensing to reason about and model the…
In conjunction with huge recent progress in camera and computer vision technology, camera-based sensors have increasingly shown considerable promise in relation to tactile sensing. In comparison to competing technologies (be they resistive,…
A long-standing question in robot hand design is how accurate tactile sensing must be. This paper uses simulated tactile signals and the reinforcement learning (RL) framework to study the sensing needs in grasping systems. Our first…
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…