Related papers: A thin and soft optical tactile sensor for highly …

Tactile sensing typically involves active exploration of unknown surfaces and objects, making it especially effective at processing the characteristics of materials and textures. A key property extracted by human tactile perception is…

Optical tactile sensors play a pivotal role in robot perception and manipulation tasks. The membrane of these sensors can be painted with markers or remain markerless, enabling them to function in either marker or markerless mode. However,…

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…

Manipulating fragile objects in environments such as homes and factories requires stable and gentle grasping along with precise and safe placement. Compared to traditional rigid grippers, the use of soft grippers reduces the control…

This work describes the development of a high-resolution tactile-sensing finger for robot grasping. This finger, inspired by previous GelSight sensing techniques, features an integration that is slimmer, more robust, and with more…

Robots have been brought to work close to humans in many scenarios. For coexistence and collaboration, robots should be safe and pleasant for humans to interact with. To this end, the robots could be both physically soft with multimodal…

Tactile sensing can provide access to information about the contact (i.e. slippage, surface feature, friction), which is out of reach of vision but crucial for manipulation. To access this information, a dense measurement of the deformation…

Deep learning and reinforcement learning methods have been shown to enable learning of flexible and complex robot controllers. However, the reliance on large amounts of training data often requires data collection to be carried out in…

Soft robotic fingers can improve adaptability in grasping and manipulation, compensating for geometric variation in object or environmental contact, but today lack force capacity and fine dexterity. Integrated tactile sensors can provide…

The biological skin enables animals to sense various stimuli. Extensive efforts have been made recently to develop smart skin-like sensors to extend the capabilities of biological skins; however, simultaneous sensing of several types of…

Tactile sensing is an essential capability for robots that carry out dexterous manipulation tasks. While cameras, Lidars and other remote sensors can assess a scene globally and instantly, tactile sensors can reduce their measurement…

One of the most important object properties that humans and robots perceive through touch is hardness. This paper investigates information-theoretic active sampling strategies for sample-efficient hardness classification with vision-based…

Humans rely on touch and tactile sensing for a lot of dexterous manipulation tasks. Our tactile sensing provides us with a lot of information regarding contact formations as well as geometric information about objects during any…

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…

The importance of force perception in interacting with the environment was proven years ago. However, it is still a challenge to measure the contact force distribution accurately in real-time. In order to break through this predicament, we…

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…

Dexterous manipulation, especially of small daily objects, continues to pose complex challenges in robotics. This paper introduces the DenseTact-Mini, an optical tactile sensor with a soft, rounded, smooth gel surface and compact design…

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…

Flexible tactile sensors are increasingly used in real-world applications such as robotic grippers, prosthetic hands, wearable gloves, and assistive devices, where they need to conform to curved and irregular surfaces. However, most…

Sensing contacts throughout the fingers is an essential capability for a robot to perform manipulation tasks in cluttered environments. However, existing tactile sensors either only have a flat sensing surface or a compliant tip with a…