Related papers: DOT-Sim: Differentiable Optical Tactile Simulation…
While tactile sensor technology has made great strides over the past decades, applications in robotic manipulation are limited by aspects such as blind spots, difficult integration into hands, and low spatial resolution. We present a method…
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…
Tactile sensing presents a promising opportunity for enhancing the interaction capabilities of today's robots. BioTac is a commonly used tactile sensor that enables robots to perceive and respond to physical tactile stimuli. However, the…
Stretchable sensors indicate promising prospects for soft robotics, medical devices, and human-machine interactions due to the high compliance of soft materials. Discrete sensing strategies, including sensor arrays and distributed sensors,…
In this paper we present DOT (Dynamic Object Tracking), a front-end that added to existing SLAM systems can significantly improve their robustness and accuracy in highly dynamic environments. DOT combines instance segmentation and…
This paper presents an improved tactile sensor using a piezoelectric bimorph able to differentiate soft materials with similar mechanical characteristics. The final aim is to develop intelligent surgical tools for brain tumour resection…
Autonomy in robotic surgery is very challenging in unstructured environments, especially when interacting with deformable soft tissues. The main difficulty is to generate model-based control methods that account for deformation dynamics…
Tactile sensing provides a promising sensing modality for object pose estimation in manipulation settings where visual information is limited due to occlusion or environmental effects. However, efficiently leveraging tactile data for…
Robot skill acquisition processes driven by reinforcement learning often rely on simulations to efficiently generate large-scale interaction data. However, the absence of simulation models for tactile sensors has hindered the use of tactile…
Tactile sensing plays an important role in robotic perception and manipulation tasks. To overcome the real-world limitations of data collection, simulating tactile response in a virtual environment comes as a desirable direction of robotic…
Manipulation of deformable objects is a challenging task for a robot. It will be problematic to use a single sensory input to track the behaviour of such objects: vision can be subjected to occlusions, whereas tactile inputs cannot capture…
GelSight family of vision-based tactile sensors has proven to be effective for multiple robot perception and manipulation tasks. These sensors are based on an internal optical system and an embedded camera to capture the deformation of the…
Dynamic optical coherence tomography (DOCT) enables label-free functional imaging by capturing temporal OCT signal variations caused by intracellular and intratissue motions. However, the relationship between DOCT signals and the sample…
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…
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…
Tactile sensing is important for robots to perceive the world as it captures the texture and hardness of the object in contact and is robust to illumination and colour variances. However, due to the limited sensing area and the resistance…
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…
Camera-based tactile sensors provide robots with a high-performance tactile sensing approach for environment perception and dexterous manipulation. However, achieving comprehensive environmental perception still requires cooperation with…
Collaborative robots stand to have an immense impact on both human welfare in domestic service applications and industrial superiority in advanced manufacturing with dexterous assembly. The outstanding challenge is providing robotic…
Differentiable simulators promise to improve sample efficiency in robot learning by providing analytic gradients of the system dynamics. Yet, their application to contact-rich tasks like locomotion is complicated by the inherently…