Related papers: Development of Soft Tactile Sensor for Force Measu…

We investigate a method to modulate contact forces between the soft fingers of a two-finger gripper and an object, without relying on tactile sensors. This work is a follow-up to our previous results on contact detection. Here, our…

Distinguishing the feel of smooth silk from coarse cotton is a trivial everyday task for humans. When exploring such fabrics, fingertip skin senses both spatio-temporal force patterns and texture-induced vibrations that are integrated to…

Hardness is among the most important attributes of an object that humans learn about through touch. However, approaches for robots to estimate hardness are limited, due to the lack of information provided by current tactile sensors. In this…

Due to their ability to move without sliding relative to their environment, soft growing robots are attractive for deploying distributed sensor networks in confined spaces. Sensing of the state of such robots would also add to their…

The importance of force perception in interacting with the environment was proven years ago. However, it is still a challenge to measure the contact force distribution accurately in real-time. In order to break through this predicament, we…

This paper presents a method for detecting and localizing contact along robot legs using distributed joint torque sensors and a single hip-mounted force-torque (FT) sensor using a generalized momentum-based observer framework. We designed a…

Tactile sensing on human feet is crucial for motion control, however, has not been explored in robotic counterparts. This work is dedicated to endowing tactile sensing to legged robot's feet and showing that a single-legged robot can be…

Traditional methods to achieve high localization accuracy with tactile sensors usually use a matrix of miniaturized individual sensors distributed on the area of interest. This approach usually comes at a price of increased complexity in…

This paper aims to present an innovative and cost-effective design for Acoustic Soft Tactile (AST) Skin, with the primary goal of significantly enhancing the accuracy of 2-D tactile feature estimation. The existing challenge lies in…

Despite significant advances in touch and force transduction, tactile sensing is still far from ubiquitous in robotic manipulation. Existing methods for building touch sensors have proven difficult to integrate into robot fingers due to…

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…

This work describes the development of a high-resolution tactile-sensing finger for robot grasping. This finger, inspired by previous GelSight sensing techniques, features an integration that is slimmer, more robust, and with more…

Almost all robotic systems in use have hard shells, which is limiting in many ways their full potential of physical interaction with humans or their surrounding environment. Robots with soft-shell covers offer an alternative morphology…

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…

Estimating the location of contact is a primary function of artificial tactile sensing apparatuses that perceive the environment through touch. Existing contact localization methods use flat geometry and uniform sensor distributions as a…

Precise perception of contact interactions is essential for fine-grained manipulation skills for robots. In this paper, we present the design of feedback skills for robots that must learn to stack complex-shaped objects on top of each other…

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…

Tactile sensing in mobile robots remains under-explored, mainly due to challenges related to sensor integration and the complexities of distributed sensing. In this work, we present a tactile sensing architecture for mobile robots based on…

Developments in touch-sensitive textiles have enabled many novel interactive techniques and applications. Our digitally-knitted capacitive active sensors can be manufactured at scale with little human intervention. Their sensitive areas are…

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…