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Tactile sensing is a crucial perception mode for robots and human amputees in need of controlling a prosthetic device. Today robotic and prosthetic systems are still missing the important feature of accurate tactile sensing. This lack is…
Dexterous manipulation, especially of small daily objects, continues to pose complex challenges in robotics. This paper introduces the DenseTact-Mini, an optical tactile sensor with a soft, rounded, smooth gel surface and compact design…
Tactile information plays a crucial role in human manipulation tasks and has recently garnered increasing attention in robotic manipulation. However, existing approaches mostly focus on the alignment of visual and tactile features and the…
Developing artificial tactile sensing capabilities that rival human touch is a long-term goal in robotics and prosthetics. Gradually more elaborate biomimetic tactile sensors are being developed and applied to grasping and manipulation…
The goal of this project is to create an inexpensive, lightweight, wearable assistive device that can measure hand or finger movements accurately enough to identify a range of hand gestures. One eventual application is to provide assistive…
Deformable objects often appear in unstructured configurations. Tracing deformable objects helps bringing them into extended states and facilitating the downstream manipulation tasks. Due to the requirements for object-specific modeling or…
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 sensation is essential for humans to recognize objects. Various devices have been developed in the past for tactile presentation by electrostatic force, which are easy to configure devices, but there is currently no such device that…
Vision based and event based tactile sensors are important in robotic manipulation research. However, they suffer from a fundamental tradeoff: vision based sensors have low sampling rates, while event based sensors are prone to drift during…
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…
For both humans and robots, the sense of touch, known as tactile sensing, is critical for performing contact-rich manipulation tasks. Three key challenges in robotic tactile sensing are 1) interpreting sensor signals, 2) generating sensor…
Recently, tactile sensing has attracted great interest in robotics, especially for facilitating exploration of unstructured environments and effective manipulation. A detailed understanding of the surface textures via tactile sensing is…
While visuomotor policy learning has advanced robotic manipulation, precisely executing contact-rich tasks remains challenging due to the limitations of vision in reasoning about physical interactions. To address this, recent work has…
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…
Vision and touch are two fundamental sensory modalities for robots, offering complementary information that enhances perception and manipulation tasks. Previous research has attempted to jointly learn visual-tactile representations to…
Manipulation tasks often require robots to be continuously in contact with an object. Therefore tactile perception systems need to handle continuous contact data. Shear deformation causes the tactile sensor to output path-dependent readings…
Liquid Crystal Elastomers (LCEs) are an exciting category of material that has tremendous application potential across a variety of fields, owing to their unique properties that enable both sensing and actuation. To some, LCEs are simply…
Event-based vision sensors, such as the Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS), are ideally suited for real-time motion analysis. The unique properties encompassed in the readings of such sensors provide high temporal resolution, superior sensitivity…
Despite the utility of tactile information, tactile sensors have yet to be widely deployed in industrial robotics settings. Part of the challenge lies in identifying slip and other key events from the tactile data stream. In this paper, we…
Robotic manipulation has seen rapid progress with vision-language-action (VLA) policies. However, visuo-tactile perception is critical for contact-rich manipulation, as tasks such as insertion are difficult to complete robustly using vision…