15 accepted papers
We present a hybrid robotic skin that combines electrical impedance tomography (EIT) with pneumatic tactile sensing to improve force reconstruction capability. The developed robotic skin is fabricated entirely by 3D printing and spray coating, making it affordable and easy to build. A Tikhonov-regul…
This paper presents a magnet-based robotic skin that integrates a multilayer soft lattice with distributed Hall-effect sensor arrays and a tactile super-resolution model. External contact forces are converted to magnetic field changes by embedded permanent magnets, and the lattice spreads these chan…
We introduce PAPRLE (Plug-And-Play Robotic Limb Environment), a modular ecosystem that enables flexible placement and control of robotic limbs. With PAPRLE, a user can re-configure the arrangement of the robotic limbs, and control them with various kinds of devices, including puppeteers, handheld co…
The Mobile Object Manipulation Operator (MOMO) is an innovative and reconfigurable robotic system that transforms traditional serving robots into mobile manipulators. Leveraging the form factor and mobility of serving robots, MOMO integrates up to three pluggable devices, including 6-DoF manipulator…
Direct physical guidance is a natural means of teaching and interacting with robots, and robotic skins make a key contribution by enabling sensitive contact sensing and localization. This paper presents a tactile–proprioceptive sensor fusion framework for rev{natural physical human-robot interaction…
This paper presents MelumiTac, a vision-based tactile (ViTAC) sensor enhanced with mechanoluminescent (ML) materials that emit green light under dynamic tactile stimuli. The integration of an ML elastomer generates self-illumination in response to dynamic tactile stimuli, enabling direct visualizati
Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT) has emerged as a promising technology for large-area robotic skin due to its ability to reconstruct pressure distribution over extensive regions using a few sparsely distributed electrodes. Despite ERT's potential to reconstruct the external forces applied on 3
Soft tactile sensors can enable robots to grasp objects easily and stably by simultaneously providing tactile data and mechanical compliance to robotic hands. If there are low-cost and easy-to-build robotic hands equipped with soft tactile sensors, they would be highly accessible and facilitate many…
Human employs different touch patterns to convey diverse social messages; for example, a stroke is an encouragement, whereas a hit is an offense. Various tactile sensors have been developed to grant an intuitive physical interaction with a robotic system, yet many encountered limitations in achievin…
A human can socially interact in a non-verbal manner by understanding the intention behind a tactile stimulus. Patting on one’s back is one of tactile communications, which is considered as a sign of encouragement in most cultures. The majority of such tactile communication is carried out by a dynam…
Hydrostatic transmission has shown promising results for enabling the manipulator to achieve low effective inertia, high stiffness, and high torque density. However, the incompressibility of fluid causes the lack of compliance, so that it could not provide intrinsic safety. Thus, it would be advanta…
The tactile and proprioceptive sensation increases human manipulability, and soft tissue compliance stabilizes the grasping function. However, it is challenging to transpose this system to the small confined space of soft robotic fingers due to the material properties and complex wiring entailed. Fu…
Electrical resistance tomography (ERT) has previously been utilized to develop a large-scale tactile sensor because this approach enables the estimation of the conductivity distribution among the electrodes based on a known physical model. Such a sensor made with a stretchable material can conform t…
Recently, a whole-body tactile sensing have emerged in robotics for safe human-robot interaction. A key issue in the whole-body tactile sensing is ensuring large-area manufacturability and high durability. To fulfill these requirements, a reconstruction method called electrical impedance tomography…
Robots operating in unstructured environments would benefit from soft whole-body tactile sensors, but implementing such systems typically requires complex electrical wiring to a large number of sensing elements. The reconstruction method called electrical resistance tomography (ERT) has shown promis…