Related papers: A Machine Learning Approach to Contact Localizatio…

Perceiving the environment through touch is important for robots to reach in cluttered environments, but devising a way to sense without disturbing objects is challenging. This work presents the design and modelling of whisker-inspired…

Observing touch on another's body can elicit corresponding tactile sensations in the observer, a phenomenon termed mirror touch that supports empathy and social perception. This visuo-tactile resonance is thought to rely on structural…

In this paper, we present a methodology that uses an optical tactile sensor for efficient tactile exploration of embedded objects within soft materials. The methodology consists of an exploration phase, where a probabilistic estimate of the…

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…

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…

The images captured by vision-based tactile sensors carry information about high-resolution tactile fields, such as the distribution of the contact forces applied to their soft sensing surface. However, extracting the information encoded in…

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…

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…

Monocular 3D human pose and shape estimation is an inherently ill-posed problem due to depth ambiguities, occlusions, and truncations. Recent probabilistic approaches learn a distribution over plausible 3D human meshes by maximizing the…

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…

Knowledge of the 6D pose of an object can benefit in-hand object manipulation. In-hand 6D object pose estimation is challenging because of heavy occlusion produced by the robot's grippers, which can have an adverse effect on methods that…

Skin, the primary regulator of heat exchange, relies on sweat glands for thermoregulation. Alterations in sweat gland morphology play a crucial role in various pathological conditions and clinical diagnoses. Current methods for observing…

Camera-based tactile sensors provide robots with a high-performance tactile sensing approach for environment perception and dexterous manipulation. However, achieving comprehensive environmental perception still requires cooperation with…

We're interested in the problem of estimating object states from touch during manipulation under occlusions. In this work, we address the problem of estimating object poses from touch during planar pushing. Vision-based tactile sensors…

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…

Humans rely on their visual and tactile senses to develop a comprehensive 3D understanding of their physical environment. Recently, there has been a growing interest in exploring and manipulating objects using data-driven approaches that…

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…

Palpation, the use of touch in medical examination, is almost exclusively performed by humans. We investigate a proof of concept for an artificial palpation method based on self-supervised learning. Our key idea is that an encoder-decoder…

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…

Soft sensors that can discriminate shear and normal force could help provide machines the fine control desirable for safe and effective physical interactions with people. A capacitive sensor is made for this purpose, composed of patterned…