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Thanks to recent advancements in the development of inexpensive, high-resolution tactile sensors, touch sensing has become popular in contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks. With the surge of data-driven methods and their requirement for…

Wearable and legged robot designers face multiple challenges when choosing actuation. Traditional fully actuated designs using electric motors are multifunctional but oversized and inefficient for bearing conservative loads and for being…

Collocated tactile sensing is a fundamental enabling technology for dexterous manipulation. However, deformable sensors introduce complex dynamics between the robot, grasped object, and environment that must be considered for fine…

In this paper, we address the problem of tactile sim-to-real policy transfer for contact-rich tasks. Existing methods primarily focus on vision-based sensors and emphasize image rendering quality while providing overly simplistic models of…

Robotics research has long sought to give robots the ability to perceive the physical world through touch in an analogous manner to many biological systems. Developing such tactile capabilities is important for numerous emerging…

High-density afferents in the human hand have long been regarded as essential for human grasping and manipulation abilities. In contrast, robotic tactile sensors are typically used to provide low-density contact data, such as…

Non-flat surfaces pose difficulties for robots operating in unstructured environments. Reconstructions of uneven surfaces may only be partially possible due to non-compliant end-effectors and limitations on vision systems such as…

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,…

Grasping objects whose physical properties are unknown is still a great challenge in robotics. Most solutions rely entirely on visual data to plan the best grasping strategy. However, to match human abilities and be able to reliably pick…

Tactile feedback is critical for understanding the dynamics of both rigid and deformable objects in many manipulation tasks, such as non-prehensile manipulation and dense packing. We introduce an approach that combines visual and tactile…

Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…

Direct design of a robot's rendered dynamics, such as in impedance control, is now a well-established control mode in uncertain environments. When the physical interaction port variables are not measured directly, dynamic and kinematic…

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…

Despite the utility of tactile information, tactile sensors have yet to be widely deployed in industrial robotics settings. Part of the challenge lies in identifying slip and other key events from the tactile data stream. In this paper, we…

Robots which interact with the physical world will benefit from a fine-grained tactile understanding of objects and surfaces. Additionally, for certain tasks, robots may need to know the haptic properties of an object before touching it. To…

High-fidelity physics simulation is essential for scalable robotic learning, but the sim-to-real gap persists, especially for tasks involving complex, dynamic, and discontinuous interactions like physical contacts. Explicit system…

Tactile sensing is a widely-studied means of implicit communication between robot and human. In this paper, we investigate how tactile sensing can help bridge differences between robotic embodiments in the context of collaborative…

The field of robotic manipulation has advanced significantly in recent years. At the sensing level, several novel tactile sensors have been developed, capable of providing accurate contact information. On a methodological level, learning…

Tactile sensing for robotics is achieved through a variety of mechanisms, including magnetic, optical-tactile, and conductive fluid. Currently, the fluid-based sensors have struck the right balance of anthropomorphic sizes and shapes and…

We present a tactile sensing method enabled by the mechanical compliance of soft robots; an externally attachable photoreflective module reads surface deformation of silicone skin to estimate contact force without embedding tactile…