Related papers: Whisker-Inspired Tactile Sensing for Contact Local…

Whisker-like touch sensors offer unique advantages for short-range perception in environments where visual and long-range sensing are unreliable, such as confined, cluttered, or low-visibility settings. This paper presents a framework for…

Perception using whisker-inspired tactile sensors currently faces a major challenge: the lack of active control in robots based on direct contact information from the whisker. To accurately reconstruct object contours, it is crucial for the…

Aquatic mammals, such as pinnipeds, utilize their whiskers to detect and discriminate objects and analyze water movements, inspiring the development of robotic whiskers for sensing contacts, surfaces, and water flows. We present the design…

Tactile sensing and the manipulation of delicate objects are critical challenges in robotics. This study presents a vision-based magnetic-actuated whisker array sensor that integrates these functions. The sensor features eight whiskers…

Localizing and tracking the pose of robotic grippers are necessary skills for manipulation tasks. However, the manipulators with imprecise kinematic models (e.g. low-cost arms) or manipulators with unknown world coordinates (e.g. poor…

Robotic exploration under uncertain environments is challenging when optical information is not available. In this paper, we propose an autonomous solution of exploring an unknown task space based on tactile sensing alone. We first designed…

Tiny flying robots hold great potential for search-and-rescue, safety inspections, and environmental monitoring, but their small size limits conventional sensing-especially with poor-lighting, smoke, dust or reflective obstacles. Inspired…

Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…

Collocated tactile sensing is a fundamental enabling technology for dexterous manipulation. However, deformable sensors introduce complex dynamics between the robot, grasped object, and environment that must be considered for fine…

This paper presents a novel framework for integration of vision and tactile sensing by localizing tactile readings in a visual object map. Intuitively, there are some correspondences, e.g., prominent features, between visual and tactile…

Tactile perception using vibration sensation helps robots recognize their environment's physical properties and perform complex tasks. A sliding motion is applied to target objects to generate tactile vibration data. However, situations…

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…

We begin this paper by presenting our approach to robot manipulation, which emphasizes the benefits of making contact with the world across the entire manipulator. We assume that low contact forces are benign, and focus on the development…

Can a robot grasp an unknown object without seeing it? In this paper, we present a tactile-sensing based approach to this challenging problem of grasping novel objects without prior knowledge of their location or physical properties. Our…

Touch sensing can help robots understand their sur- rounding environment, and in particular the objects they interact with. To this end, roboticists have, in the last few decades, developed several tactile sensing solutions, extensively…

Locating and grasping of objects by robots is typically performed using visual sensors. Haptic feedback from contacts with the environment is only secondary if present at all. In this work, we explored an extreme case of searching for and…

This paper addresses the localization of contacts of an unknown grasped rigid object with its environment, i.e., extrinsic to the robot. We explore the key role that distributed tactile sensing plays in localizing contacts external to the…

Proximity perception is a technology that has the potential to play an essential role in the future of robotics. It can fulfill the promise of safe, robust, and autonomous systems in industry and everyday life, alongside humans, as well as…

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…

This work deals with a practical everyday problem: stable object placement on flat surfaces starting from unknown initial poses. Common object-placing approaches require either complete scene specifications or extrinsic sensor measurements,…