Related papers: Sub-surface Skin Deformation in Response to Gentle…

In the human hand, high-density contact information provided by afferent neurons is essential for many human grasping and manipulation capabilities. In contrast, robotic tactile sensors, including the state-of-the-art SynTouch BioTac, are…

Vision and touch are two of the important sensing modalities for humans and they offer complementary information for sensing the environment. Robots could also benefit from such multi-modal sensing ability. In this paper, addressing for the…

The human somatosensory cortex is intimately linked to other central brain functions such as vision, audition, mechanoreception, and motor planning and control. These links are established through brain learning, and display a considerable…

Accurately modeling local surface properties of objects is crucial to many robotic applications, from grasping to material recognition. Surface properties like friction are however difficult to estimate, as visual observation of the object…

The friction and adhesion between elastic bodies are strongly influenced by the roughness of the surfaces in contact. Here we develop a multiscale molecular dynamics approach to contact mechanics, which can be used also when the surfaces…

Modern incarnations of tactile sensors produce high-dimensional raw sensory feedback such as images, making it challenging to efficiently store, process, and generalize across sensors. To address these concerns, we introduce a novel…

Oblique, low-velocity impacts onto extraterrestrial terrain are an inevitable occurrence during space exploration. We conduct two-dimensional discrete simulations to model such impacts into a bed of triangular grains. Finite element method…

Tactile sensing in biological organisms is deeply intertwined with morphological form, such as human fingers, cat paws, and elephant trunks, which enables rich and adaptive interactions through a variety of geometrically complex structures.…

Development of large-area, high-speed electronic skins is a grand challenge for robotics, prosthetics, and human-machine interfaces, but is fundamentally limited by wiring complexity and data bottlenecks. Here, we introduce Single-Pixel…

Tactile sensing is one of the modalities humans rely on heavily to perceive the world. Working with vision, this modality refines local geometry structure, measures deformation at the contact area, and indicates the hand-object contact…

We present Sparsh-skin, a pre-trained encoder for magnetic skin sensors distributed across the fingertips, phalanges, and palm of a dexterous robot hand. Magnetic tactile skins offer a flexible form factor for hand-wide coverage with fast…

Traditional methods to achieve high localization accuracy with tactile sensors usually use a matrix of miniaturized individual sensors distributed on the area of interest. This approach usually comes at a price of increased complexity in…

For machines to interact with the physical world, they must understand the physical properties of objects and materials they encounter. We use fabrics as an example of a deformable material with a rich set of mechanical properties. A thin…

Tactile sensing is essential to the human perception system, so as to robot. In this paper, we develop a novel optical-based tactile sensor "FingerVision" with effective signal processing algorithms. This sensor is composed of soft skin…

Electroadhesion has emerged as a viable technique for displaying tactile feedback on touch surfaces, particularly capacitive touchscreens found in smartphones and tablets. This involves applying a voltage signal to the conductive layer of…

Spatial tactile feedback can enhance the realism of geometry exploration in virtual reality applications. Current vibrotactile approaches often face challenges with the spatial and temporal resolution needed to render different 3D…

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…

Distributed tactile sensing remains difficult to scale over large areas: dense sensor arrays increase wiring, cost, and fragility, while many alternatives provide limited coverage or miss fast interaction dynamics. We present Sound of…

Simulating the effects of skincare products on face is a potential new way to communicate the efficacy of skincare products in skin diagnostics and product recommendations. Furthermore, such simulations enable one to anticipate his/her skin…

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…