English
Related papers

Related papers: Fine Manipulation Using a Tactile Skin: Learning i…

200 papers

Vision-based learning from demonstrations has achieved remarkable success in enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks and high-level semantic reasoning, yet it remains insufficient for complex, contact-rich manipulation. While there is…

Human skin provides a rich tactile sensing stream, localizing intentional and unintentional contact events over a large and contoured region. Replicating these tactile sensing capabilities for dexterous robotic manipulation systems remains…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Suzannah Wistreich , Baiyu Shi , Stephen Tian , Samuel Clarke , Michael Nath , Chengyi Xu , Zhenan Bao , Jiajun Wu

Deep learning has the potential to have the impact on robot touch that it has had on robot vision. Optical tactile sensors act as a bridge between the subjects by allowing techniques from vision to be applied to touch. In this paper, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-12-07 Nathan F. Lepora , Alex Church , Conrad De Kerckhove , Raia Hadsell , John Lloyd

Reinforcement learning (RL) and sim-to-real transfer have advanced rigid-object manipulation. However, policies remain brittle for articulated mechanisms due to contact-rich dynamics that require both stable grasping and simultaneous free…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Soofiyan Atar , Daniel Huang , Florian Richter , Michael Yip

Touch sensing is widely acknowledged to be important for dexterous robotic manipulation, but exploiting tactile sensing for continuous, non-prehensile manipulation is challenging. General purpose control techniques that are able to…

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-07 Chang Cheng , Yadong Yan , Mingjun Guan , Jianan Zhang , Yu Wang

Simulation has recently become key for deep reinforcement learning to safely and efficiently acquire general and complex control policies from visual and proprioceptive inputs. Tactile information is not usually considered despite its…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Alex Church , John Lloyd , Raia Hadsell , Nathan F. Lepora

Due to the complexity of modeling the elastic properties of materials, the use of machine learning algorithms is continuously increasing for tactile sensing applications. Recent advances in deep neural networks applied to computer vision…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-06-05 Carmelo Sferrazza , Raffaello D'Andrea

Tactile and visual perception are both crucial for humans to perform fine-grained interactions with their environment. Developing similar multi-modal sensing capabilities for robots can significantly enhance and expand their manipulation…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Binghao Huang , Yixuan Wang , Xinyi Yang , Yiyue Luo , Yunzhu Li

Reproducing the capabilities of the human sense of touch in machines is an important step in enabling robot manipulation to have the ease of human dexterity. A combination of robotic technologies will be needed, including soft robotics,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-23 Nathan F. Lepora

Reinforcement learning and sim-to-real transfer have made significant progress in dexterous manipulation. However, progress remains limited by the difficulty of simulating complex contact dynamics and multisensory signals, especially…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Elvis Hsieh , Wen-Han Hsieh , Yen-Jen Wang , Toru Lin , Jitendra Malik , Koushil Sreenath , Haozhi Qi

Imitation learning for robot dexterous manipulation, especially with a real robot setup, typically requires a large number of demonstrations. In this paper, we present a data-efficient learning from demonstration framework which exploits…

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-07-24 Masoud Baghbahari , Aman Behal

Advanced dexterous manipulation involving multiple simultaneous contacts across different surfaces, like pinching coins from ground or manipulating intertwined objects, remains challenging for robotic systems. Such tasks exceed the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Won Kyung Do , Matthew Strong , Aiden Swann , Boshu Lei , Monroe Kennedy

Achieving safe, reliable real-world robotic manipulation requires agents to evolve beyond vision and incorporate tactile sensing to overcome sensory deficits and reliance on idealised state information. Despite its potential, the efficacy…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Elle Miller , Trevor McInroe , David Abel , Oisin Mac Aodha , Sethu Vijayakumar

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Venkatesh Pattabiraman , Yifeng Cao , Siddhant Haldar , Lerrel Pinto , Raunaq Bhirangi

Handheld grippers are increasingly used to collect human demonstrations due to their ease of deployment and versatility. However, most existing designs lack tactile sensing, despite the critical role of tactile feedback in precise…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Xinyue Zhu , Binghao Huang , Yunzhu Li

Traditional control methods effectively manage robot operations using models like motion equations but face challenges with issues of contact and friction, leading to unstable and imprecise controllers that often require manual tweaking.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-20 Bahador Beigomi , Zheng H. Zhu

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Delin Hu , Zhou Chen , Paul Baisamy , Zhe Liu , Francesco Giorgio-Serchi , Yunjie Yang

Recent work has demonstrated the ability of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to learn complex robotic behaviours in simulation, including in the domain of multi-fingered manipulation. However, such models can be challenging to…