Related papers: Seeing Through your Skin: Recognizing Objects with…
Tactile and visual perception are both crucial for humans to perform fine-grained interactions with their environment. Developing similar multi-modal sensing capabilities for robots can significantly enhance and expand their manipulation…
We present a tactile sensing method enabled by the mechanical compliance of soft robots; an externally attachable photoreflective module reads surface deformation of silicone skin to estimate contact force without embedding tactile…
As more robots are implemented for contact-rich tasks, tactile sensors are in increasing demand. For many circumstances, the contact is required to be compliant, and soft sensors are in need. This paper introduces a novelly designed soft…
Tactile sensing is a fundamental modality for embodied intelligence, offering unique and direct feedback on contact geometry, material properties, and interaction dynamics that remote sensors cannot replace. However, unimodal tactile…
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…
Today's touch sensors come in many shapes and sizes. This has made it challenging to develop general-purpose touch processing methods since models are generally tied to one specific sensor design. We address this problem by performing…
People with visual impairments face numerous challenges when interacting with their environment. Our objective is to develop a device that facilitates communication between individuals with visual impairments and their surroundings. The…
Humans represent and discriminate the objects in the same category using their properties, and an intelligent robot should be able to do the same. In this paper, we build a robot system that can autonomously perceive the object properties…
We address the problem of tactile localization, where the goal is to identify image regions that share the same material properties as a tactile input. Existing visuo-tactile methods rely on global alignment and thus fail to capture the…
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…
To foster an immersive and natural human-robot interaction, the implementation of tactile perception and feedback becomes imperative, effectively bridging the conventional sensory gap. In this paper, we propose a dual-modal electronic skin…
Deformable objects often appear in unstructured configurations. Tracing deformable objects helps bringing them into extended states and facilitating the downstream manipulation tasks. Due to the requirements for object-specific modeling or…
Optics-less cutaneous (skin) vision is not rare among living organisms, though its mechanisms and capabilities have not been thoroughly investigated. This paper demonstrates, using methods from statistical parameter estimation theory and…
Compared to rigid hands, underactuated compliant hands offer greater adaptability to object shapes, provide stable grasps, and are often more cost-effective. However, they introduce uncertainties in hand-object interactions due to their…
Humans make extensive use of vision and touch as complementary senses, with vision providing global information about the scene and touch measuring local information during manipulation without suffering from occlusions. While prior work…
Tactile sensing is inherently contact based. To use tactile data, robots need to make contact with the surface of an object. This is inefficient in applications where an agent needs to make a decision between multiple alternatives that…
Deep learning has the potential to have the impact on robot touch that it has had on robot vision. Optical tactile sensors act as a bridge between the subjects by allowing techniques from vision to be applied to touch. In this paper, we…
This paper explores active sensing strategies that employ vision-based tactile sensors for robotic perception and classification of fabric textures. We formalize the active sampling problem in the context of tactile fabric recognition and…
Visuo-tactile perception aims to understand an object's tactile properties, such as texture, softness, and rigidity. However, the field remains underexplored because collecting tactile data is costly and labor-intensive. We observe that…
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…