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Robots that traverse natural terrain must interpret contact forces generated under highly dynamic conditions. However, most terrain characterization approaches rely on quasi-static assumptions that neglect velocity- and…

Limitations in actuation, sensing, and computation have forced small legged robots to rely on carefully tuned, mechanically mediated leg trajectories for effective locomotion. Recent advances in manufacturing, however, have enabled the…

High-density afferents in the human hand have long been regarded as essential for human grasping and manipulation abilities. In contrast, robotic tactile sensors are typically used to provide low-density contact data, such as…

The existence of tactile afferents sensitive to slip-related mechanical transients in the human hand augments the robustness of grasping through secondary force modulation protocols. Despite this knowledge and the fact that tactile-based…

Robots operating in an open world will encounter novel objects with unknown physical properties, such as mass, friction, or size. These robots will need to sense these properties through interaction prior to performing downstream tasks with…

We propose a neuromorphic tactile sensing framework for robotic texture classification that is inspired by human exploratory strategies. Our system utilizes the NeuroTac sensor to capture neuromorphic tactile data during a series of…

Robotic manipulation requires both rich multimodal perception and effective learning frameworks to handle complex real-world tasks. See-through-skin (STS) sensors, which combine tactile and visual perception, offer promising sensing…

Tactile sensing is essential for robots to perceive and react to the environment. However, it remains a challenge to make large-scale and flexible tactile skins on robots. Industrial machine knitting provides solutions to manufacture…

Touch is an important channel for human-robot interaction, while it is challenging for robots to recognize human touch accurately and make appropriate responses. In this paper, we design and implement a set of large-format distributed…

Object properties perceived through the tactile sense, such as weight, friction, and slip, greatly influence motor control during manipulation tasks. However, the provision of tactile information during robotic training in…

Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…

Rotational displacement about the grasping point is a common grasp failure when an object is grasped at a location away from its center of gravity. Tactile sensors with soft surfaces, such as GelSight sensors, can detect the rotation…

Much of the literature on robotic perception focuses on the visual modality. Vision provides a global observation of a scene, making it broadly useful. However, in the domain of robotic manipulation, vision alone can sometimes prove…

Tactile sensing provides robots with rich feedback during manipulation, enabling a host of perception and controls capabilities. Here, we present a new open-source, vision-based tactile sensor designed to promote reproducibility and…

In this article, we propose a deep learning framework that provides a unified approach to the problem of leg contact detection in humanoid robot walking gaits. Our formulation accomplishes to accurately and robustly estimate the contact…

Reliably planning fingertip grasps for multi-fingered hands lies as a key challenge for many tasks including tool use, insertion, and dexterous in-hand manipulation. This task becomes even more difficult when the robot lacks an accurate…

Tactile perception is important for robotic systems that interact with the world through touch. Touch is an active sense in which tactile measurements depend on the contact properties of an interaction--e.g., velocity, force,…

Tactile perception is crucial for a variety of robot tasks including grasping and in-hand manipulation. New advances in flexible, event-driven, electronic skins may soon endow robots with touch perception capabilities similar to humans.…

While tactile skins have been shown to be useful for detecting collisions between a robotic arm and its environment, they have not been extensively used for improving robotic grasping and in-hand manipulation. We propose a novel sensor…

Attaining animal-like legged locomotion on rough outdoor terrain with sparse foothold affordances -a primary use-case for legs vs other forms of locomotion- is a largely open problem. New advancements in control and perception have enabled…