Related papers: UniTac: Whole-Robot Touch Sensing Without Tactile …
Tactile sensing is important for robots to perceive the world as it captures the texture and hardness of the object in contact and is robust to illumination and colour variances. However, due to the limited sensing area and the resistance…
Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models build upon vision-language foundations, and have achieved promising results and exhibit the possibility of task generalization in robot manipulation. However, due to the heterogeneity of tactile…
While tactile sensor technology has made great strides over the past decades, applications in robotic manipulation are limited by aspects such as blind spots, difficult integration into hands, and low spatial resolution. We present a method…
A long-standing objective in humanoid robotics is the realization of versatile agents capable of following diverse multimodal instructions with human-level flexibility. Despite advances in humanoid control, bridging high-level multimodal…
Current methods for estimating force from tactile sensor signals are either inaccurate analytic models or task-specific learned models. In this paper, we explore learning a robust model that maps tactile sensor signals to force. We…
Robots are increasingly envisioned as human companions, assisting with everyday tasks that often involve manipulating deformable objects. Although recent advances in robotic hardware and embodied AI have expanded their capabilities, current…
Human touch depends on the integration of shape, stiffness, and friction, yet existing tactile displays cannot render these cues together as continuously tunable, high-fidelity signals for intuitive perception. We present ArrayTac, a…
TouchFusion is a wristband that enables touch interactions on nearby surfaces without any additional instrumentation or computer vision. TouchFusion combines surface electromyography (sEMG), bioimpedance, inertial, and optical sensing to…
This study presents a novel approach for touch sensing using semi-elastic textile surfaces that does not require the placement of additional sensors in the sensing area, instead relying on sensors located on the border of the textile. The…
Distinguishing the feel of smooth silk from coarse cotton is a trivial everyday task for humans. When exploring such fabrics, fingertip skin senses both spatio-temporal force patterns and texture-induced vibrations that are integrated to…
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…
Human-robot collaboration has been studied primarily in dyadic or sequential settings. However, real homes require multiadic collaboration, where multiple humans and robots share a workspace, acting concurrently on interleaved subtasks with…
The development of tactile sensing is expected to enhance robotic systems in handling complex objects like deformables or reflective materials. However, readily available industrial grippers generally lack tactile feedback, which has led…
ThumbTrak is a novel wearable input device that recognizes 12 micro-finger poses in real-time. Poses are characterized by the thumb touching each of the 12 phalanges on the hand. It uses a thumb-ring, built with a flexible printed circuit…
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…
Optical tactile sensors have recently become popular. They provide high spatial resolution, but struggle to offer fine temporal resolutions. To overcome this shortcoming, we study the idea of replacing the RGB camera with an event-based…
Increasing the performance of tactile sensing in robots enables versatile, in-hand manipulation. Vision-based tactile sensors have been widely used as rich tactile feedback has been shown to be correlated with increased performance in…
Humans naturally grasp objects with minimal level required force for stability, whereas robots often rely on rigid, over-squeezing control. To narrow this gap, we propose a human-inspired physics-conditioned tactile method (Phy-Tac) for…
Mechanically characterizing the human-machine interface is essential to understanding user behavior and optimizing wearable robot performance. This interface has been challenging to sensorize due to manufacturing complexity and non-linear…
Anthropomorphic underactuated hands are valued for their structural simplicity and inherent adaptability. However, the uncertainty arising from interdependent joint motions makes it challenging to capture various grasp states during…