Related papers: Vibro-Sense: Robust Vibration-based Impulse Respon…

Humans display the remarkable ability to sense the world through tools and other held objects. For example, we are able to pinpoint impact locations on a held rod and tell apart different textures using a rigid probe. In this work, we…

The perception and recognition of the surroundings is one of the essential tasks for a robot. With preliminary knowledge about a target object, it can perform various manipulation tasks such as rolling motion, palpation, and force control.…

Tactile sensing is a essential for skilled manipulation and object perception, but existing devices are unable to capture mechanical signals in the full gamut of regimes that are important for human touch sensing, and are unable to emulate…

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…

Locating and grasping of objects by robots is typically performed using visual sensors. Haptic feedback from contacts with the environment is only secondary if present at all. In this work, we explored an extreme case of searching for and…

Stable and reliable grasp is critical to robotic manipulations especially for fragile and glazed objects, where the grasp force requires precise control as too large force possibly damages the objects while small force leads to slip and…

Soft robotics is an emerging field that yields promising results for tasks that require safe and robust interactions with the environment or with humans, such as grasping, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. Soft robots rely on…

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…

Perception in robot manipulation has been actively explored with the goal of advancing and integrating vision and touch for global and local feature extraction. However, it is difficult to perceive certain object internal states, and the…

Achieving high spatial resolution in contact sensing for robotic manipulation often comes at the price of increased complexity in fabrication and integration. One traditional approach is to fabricate a large number of taxels, each…

Diagnostic activities, such as ultrasound scans and palpation, are relatively low-cost. They play a crucial role in the early detection of health problems and in assessing their progression. However, they are also error-prone activities,…

Stiffness estimation is crucial for delicate object manipulation in robotic and prosthetic hands but remains challenging due to dependence on force and displacement measurement and real-time sensory integration. This study presents a…

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…

We introduce SonicSense, a holistic design of hardware and software to enable rich robot object perception through in-hand acoustic vibration sensing. While previous studies have shown promising results with acoustic sensing for object…

Robot-to-human object handover is an essential skill for robot assistants, from serving drinks at home to passing surgical tools in the operating room. We expect robots to perform handover robustly -- to release the object only after a firm…

Object properties perceived through the tactile sense, such as weight, friction, and slip, greatly influence motor control during manipulation tasks. However, the provision of tactile information during robotic training in…

Sensory feedback is the fundamental driving force behind motor control and learning. However, the technology for low-cost and efficient sensory feedback remains a big challenge during stroke rehabilitation, and for prosthetic designs. Here…

Tactile and visual perception are both crucial for humans to perform fine-grained interactions with their environment. Developing similar multi-modal sensing capabilities for robots can significantly enhance and expand their manipulation…

This study explores the use of microphones placed on a robot's body to detect tactile interactions via sounds produced when the hard shell of the robot is touched. This approach is proposed as an alternative to traditional methods using…

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…