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The sense of touch plays a key role in enabling humans to understand and interact with surrounding environments. For robots, tactile sensing is also irreplaceable. While interacting with objects, tactile sensing provides useful information…
Tactile sensing is an essential perception for robots to complete dexterous tasks. As a promising tactile sensing technique, vision-based tactile sensors have been developed to improve robot performance in manipulation and grasping. Here we…
Conventional industrial robots often use two-fingered grippers or suction cups to manipulate objects or interact with the world. Because of their simplified design, they are unable to reproduce the dexterity of human hands when manipulating…
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…
Tactile feedback is critical for understanding the dynamics of both rigid and deformable objects in many manipulation tasks, such as non-prehensile manipulation and dense packing. We introduce an approach that combines visual and tactile…
To achieve a dexterous robotic manipulation, we need to endow our robot with tactile feedback capability, i.e. the ability to drive action based on tactile sensing. In this paper, we specifically address the challenge of tactile servoing,…
In this paper, a novel tactile sensing mechanism for soft robotic fingers is proposed. Inspired by the proprioception mechanism found in mammals, the proposed approach infers tactile information from a strain sensor attached on the finger's…
Soft optical tactile sensors enable robots to manipulate deformable objects by capturing important features such as high-resolution contact geometry and estimations of object compliance. This work presents a variable stiffness soft tactile…
We want to enable fine manipulation with a multi-fingered robotic hand by using modern deep reinforcement learning methods. Key for fine manipulation is a spatially resolved tactile sensor. Here, we present a novel model of a tactile skin…
Endowing robots with tactile capabilities opens up new possibilities for their interaction with the environment, including the ability to handle fragile and/or soft objects. In this work, we equip the robot gripper with low-cost…
Reliable robotic grasping, especially with deformable objects such as fruits, remains a challenging task due to underactuated contact interactions with a gripper, unknown object dynamics and geometries. In this study, we propose a…
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…
Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…
In the human hand, high-density contact information provided by afferent neurons is essential for many human grasping and manipulation capabilities. In contrast, robotic tactile sensors, including the state-of-the-art SynTouch BioTac, are…
Non-flat surfaces pose difficulties for robots operating in unstructured environments. Reconstructions of uneven surfaces may only be partially possible due to non-compliant end-effectors and limitations on vision systems such as…
A GelSight sensor uses an elastomeric slab covered with a reflective membrane to measure tactile signals. It measures the 3D geometry and contact force information with high spacial resolution, and successfully helped many challenging robot…
Vision-based tactile sensors typically utilize a deformable elastomer and a camera mounted above to provide high-resolution image observations of contacts. Obtaining accurate volumetric meshes for the deformed elastomer can provide direct…
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…
Manipulation of deformable objects is a challenging task for a robot. It will be problematic to use a single sensory input to track the behaviour of such objects: vision can be subjected to occlusions, whereas tactile inputs cannot capture…
Dense collections of movable objects are common in everyday spaces-from cabinets in a home to shelves in a warehouse. Safely retracting objects from such collections is difficult for robots, yet people do it frequently, leveraging learned…