Related papers: Tactile Robotics: An Outlook
Tactile sensors have been developed since the early '70s and have greatly improved, but there are still no widely adopted solutions. Various technologies, such as capacitive, piezoelectric, piezoresistive, optical, and magnetic, are used in…
As the largest organ in the human body, the skin provides the important sensory channel for humans to receive external stimulations based on touch. By the information perceived through touch, people can feel and guess the properties of…
This paper describes the design of a multi-camera optical tactile sensor that provides information about the contact force distribution applied to its soft surface. This information is contained in the motion of spherical particles spread…
Multimodal tactile sensing could potentially enable robots to improve their performance at manipulation tasks by rapidly discriminating between task-relevant objects. Data-driven approaches to this tactile perception problem show promise,…
The most common sensing modalities found in a robot perception system are vision and touch, which together can provide global and highly localized data for manipulation. However, these sensing modalities often fail to adequately capture the…
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…
Touch is a crucial sensing modality that provides rich information about object properties and interactions with the physical environment. Humans and robots both benefit from using touch to perceive and interact with the surrounding…
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…
The Internet has made several giant leaps over the years, from a fixed to a mobile Internet, then to the Internet of Things, and now to a Tactile Internet. The Tactile Internet goes far beyond data, audio and video delivery over fixed and…
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…
Traditional methods for achieving high localization accuracy on tactile sensors usually involve a matrix of miniaturized individual sensors distributed on the area of interest. This approach usually comes at a price of increased complexity…
This paper introduces mathematical models of \sensors\ for mobile robots based on visibility. Serving a purpose similar to the pinhole camera model for computer vision, the introduced models are expected to provide a useful, idealized…
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…
Humans achieve stable and dexterous object manipulation by coordinating grasp forces across multiple fingers and palms, facilitated by a unified tactile memory system in the somatosensory cortex. This system encodes and stores tactile…
Little research into tactile feet has been done for walking robots despite the benefits such feedback could give when walking on uneven terrain. This paper describes the development of a simple, robust and inexpensive tactile foot for…
Coordinating proximity and tactile imaging by collocating cameras with tactile sensors can 1) provide useful information before contact such as object pose estimates and visually servo a robot to a target with reduced occlusion and higher…
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…
The advent of tactile sensors in robotics has sparked many ideas on how robots can leverage direct contact measurements of their environment interactions to improve manipulation tasks. An important line of research in this regard is that of…
Tactile sensing is a key enabling technology to develop complex behaviours for robots interacting with humans or the environment. This paper discusses computational aspects playing a significant role when extracting information about…
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,…