Related papers: StRETcH: a Soft to Resistive Elastic Tactile Hand

Tactile sensors are increasingly integrated into dexterous robotic manipulators to enhance contact perception. However, learning manipulation policies that rely on tactile sensing remains challenging, primarily due to the trade-off between…

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…

The sophisticated sense of touch of the human hand significantly contributes to our ability to safely, efficiently, and dexterously manipulate arbitrary objects in our environment. Robotic and prosthetic devices lack refined, tactile…

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…

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…

Robotic manipulation tasks such as inserting a key into a lock or plugging a USB device into a port can fail when visual perception is insufficient to detect misalignment. In these situations, touch sensing is crucial for the robot to…

Robotic manipulation has made significant advancements, with systems demonstrating high precision and repeatability. However, this remarkable precision often fails to translate into efficient manipulation of thin deformable objects. Current…

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…

Collaborative robots stand to have an immense impact on both human welfare in domestic service applications and industrial superiority in advanced manufacturing with dexterous assembly. The outstanding challenge is providing robotic…

Many robotic hands currently rely on extremely dexterous robotic fingers and a thumb joint to envelop themselves around an object. Few hands focus on the palm even though human hands greatly benefit from their central fold and soft surface.…

Soft robotic actuators are safe and adaptable devices with inherent compliance, which makes them attractive for manipulating delicate and complex objects. Researchers have integrated stiff materials into soft actuators to increase their…

Compared to traditional rigid robotics, soft robotics has attracted increasing attention due to its advantages as compliance, safety, and low cost. As an essential part of soft robotics, the soft robotic gripper also shows its superior…

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…

In this paper, we present a touch technology to achieve tactile interactivity for human-robot interaction (HRI) in soft robotics. By combining a capacitive touch sensor with an online solid mechanics simulation provided by the SOFA…

Robotic tactile sensing provides a method of recognizing objects and their properties where vision fails. Prior work on tactile perception in robotic manipulation has frequently focused on exploratory procedures (EPs). However, the…

Increasing the performance of tactile sensing in robots enables versatile, in-hand manipulation. Vision-based tactile sensors have been widely used as rich tactile feedback has been shown to be correlated with increased performance in…

There is a surge of research interest in the field of tensegrity robotics. Robots developed under this paradigm provide many advantages and have distinguishing features in terms of structural compliance, dexterity, safety, and weight…

Variable stiffness actuators undergo lower peak force in contacts compared to their rigid counterparts, and are thus safer for human-robot interaction. Furthermore, they can store energy in their elastic element and can release it later to…

With the increasing demand for human-computer interaction (HCI), flexible wearable gloves have emerged as a promising solution in virtual reality, medical rehabilitation, and industrial automation. However, the current technology still has…

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…