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

Series Elastic Actuators provide many benefits in force control of robots in unconstrained environments. These benefits include high force fidelity, extremely low impedance, low friction, and good force control bandwidth. Series Elastic…

We propose a mechanically simple and cheap design for a series elastic actuator with controllable stiffness. Such characteristics are necessary for animals for running, jumping, throwing, and manipulation, yet in robots, variable stiffness…

Humans can effortlessly perform very complex, dexterous manipulation tasks by reacting to sensor observations. In contrast, robots can not perform reactive manipulation and they mostly operate in open-loop while interacting with their…

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…

Tactile sensing plays an important role in robotic perception and manipulation. To overcome the real-world limitations of data collection, simulating tactile response in virtual environment comes as a desire direction of robotic research.…

The purpose of this study is to construct a contact point estimation system for the both side of a finger, and to realize a motion of bending the finger after inserting the finger into a tool (hereinafter referred to as the bending after…

If human experience is any guide, operating effectively in unstructured environments -- like homes and offices -- requires robots to sense the forces during physical interaction. Yet, the lack of a versatile, accessible, and easily…

The safety and accuracy of robotic navigation hold paramount importance, especially in the realm of soft continuum robotics, where the limitations of traditional rigid sensors become evident. Encoders, piezoresistive, and potentiometer…

Medical applications of robots are increasingly popular to objectivise and speed up the execution of several types of diagnostic and therapeutic interventions. Particularly important is a class of diagnostic activities that require physical…

Tactile sensing is an essential capability for robots that carry out dexterous manipulation tasks. While cameras, Lidars and other remote sensors can assess a scene globally and instantly, tactile sensors can reduce their measurement…

To adapt to constantly changing environments and be safe for human interaction, robots should have compliant and soft characteristics as well as the ability to sense the world around them. Even so, the incorporation of tactile sensing into…

This work presents NeuroTouch, an optical-based tactile sensor that combines a highly deformable dome-shaped soft material with an integrated neuromorphic camera, leveraging frame-based and dynamic vision for gesture detection. Our approach…

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…

Traditional methods for achieving high localization accuracy on tactile sensors usually involve a matrix of miniaturized individual sensors distributed on the area of interest. This approach usually comes at a price of increased complexity…

Tactile sensing can provide access to information about the contact (i.e. slippage, surface feature, friction), which is out of reach of vision but crucial for manipulation. To access this information, a dense measurement of the deformation…

This paper presents an improved tactile sensor using a piezoelectric bimorph able to differentiate soft materials with similar mechanical characteristics. The final aim is to develop intelligent surgical tools for brain tumour resection…

Executing contact-rich manipulation tasks necessitates the fusion of tactile and visual feedback. However, the distinct nature of these modalities poses significant challenges. In this paper, we introduce a system that leverages visual and…

Tactile sensing has become a popular sensing modality for robot manipulators, due to the promise of providing robots with the ability to measure the rich contact information that gets transmitted through its sense of touch. Among the…

Tactile memory, the ability to store and retrieve touch-based experience, is critical for contact-rich tasks such as key insertion under uncertainty. To replicate this capability, we introduce Tactile Memory with Soft Robot (TaMeSo-bot), a…

Soft robotic grippers demonstrate great potential for gently and safely handling objects; however, their full potential for executing precise and secure grasping has been limited by the lack of integrated sensors, leading to problems such…