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Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT)-based tactile sensors offer cost-effective and scalable solutions for robotic sensing, especially promising for soft robots. However a major issue of EIT-based tactile sensors when applied in highly…
Optical tactile sensors have recently become popular. They provide high spatial resolution, but struggle to offer fine temporal resolutions. To overcome this shortcoming, we study the idea of replacing the RGB camera with an event-based…
For contact-intensive tasks, the ability to generate policies that produce comprehensive tactile-aware motions is essential. However, existing data collection and skill learning systems for dexterous manipulation often suffer from…
Tactile sensing is critical for robotic grasping and manipulation of objects under visual occlusion. However, in contrast to simulations of robot arms and cameras, current simulations of tactile sensors have limited accuracy, speed, and…
Training robot policies in simulation is becoming increasingly popular; nevertheless, a precise, reliable, and easy-to-use tactile simulator for contact-rich manipulation tasks is still missing. To close this gap, we develop TacEx -- a…
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…
Tactile sensing is fundamental to robotic systems, enabling interactions through physical contact in multiple tasks. Despite its importance, achieving high-resolution, large-area tactile sensing remains challenging. Electrical Impedance…
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.…
Tactile sensing in soft robots remains particularly challenging because of the coupling between contact and deformation information which the sensor is subject to during actuation and interaction with the environment. This often results in…
Deformable object manipulation is a classical and challenging research area in robotics. Compared with rigid object manipulation, this problem is more complex due to the deformation properties including elastic, plastic, and elastoplastic…
Tactile sensing is an essential perception for robots to complete dexterous tasks. As a promising tactile sensing technique, vision-based tactile sensors have been developed to improve robot performance in manipulation and grasping. Here we…
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…
Tactile perception stands as a critical sensory modality for human interaction with the environment. Among various tactile sensor techniques, optical sensor-based approaches have gained traction, notably for producing high-resolution…
Tactile sensing plays an important role in robotic perception and manipulation. To overcome the real-world limitations of data collection, simulating tactile response in virtual environment comes as a desire direction of robotic research.…
Simulation frameworks such as Isaac Sim have enabled scalable robot learning for locomotion and rigid-body manipulation; however, contact-rich simulation remains a major bottleneck for deformable object manipulation. The continuously…
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…
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…
Simulation is widely applied in robotics research to save time and resources. There have been several works to simulate optical tactile sensors that leverage either a smoothing method or Finite Element Method (FEM). However, elastomer…
Robotic manipulation tasks such as inserting a key into a lock or plugging a USB device into a port can fail when visual perception is insufficient to detect misalignment. In these situations, touch sensing is crucial for the robot to…
Tactile perception is key to dexterous manipulation, yet simulating high-resolution elastomer deformation remains computationally prohibitive. Finite element methods (FEM) deliver high fidelity but demand costly remeshing, while Material…