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Nathan Lepora

7 accepted papers

2026

How to Train Your Tactile Model: Tactile Perception with Multi-Fingered Robot Hands

ICRA 2026poster

Rapid deployment of new tactile sensors is essential for scalable robotic manipulation, especially in multi-fingered hands equipped with vision-based tactile sensors. However, current methods for inferring contact properties rely heavily on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which, while effectiv…

2026

Shear-Based Grasp Control for Multi-Fingered Underactuated Tactile Robotic Hands

ICRA 2026poster

This paper presents a shear-based control scheme for grasping and manipulating delicate objects with a Pisa/IIT anthropomorphic SoftHand equipped with soft biomimetic tactile sensors on all five fingertips. These `microTac' tactile sensors are miniature versions of the TacTip vision-based tactile se…

2026

SoftHand Model-W: A 3D-Printed, Anthropomorphic, Underactuated Robot Hand with Integrated Wrist and Carpal Tunnel

ICRA 2026poster

This paper presents the SoftHand Model-W: a 3D-printed, underactuated, anthropomorphic robot hand based on the Pisa/IIT SoftHand, with an integrated antagonistic tendon mechanism and 2 degree-of-freedom tendon-driven wrist. These four degrees-of-acuation provide active flexion and extension to the f…

2026

ViTacGen: Robotic Pushing with Vision-To-Touch Generation

ICRA 2026poster

Robotic pushing is a fundamental manipulation task that requires tactile feedback to capture subtle contact forces and dynamics between the end-effector and the object. However, real tactile sensors often face hardware limitations and deployment challenges, while vision-only policies struggle with s…

2024

TacShade: A New 3D-printed Soft Optical Tactile Sensor Based on Light, Shadow and Greyscale for Shape Reconstruction

ICRA 2024poster

In this paper, we present the TacShade: a newly designed 3D-printed soft optical tactile sensor. The sensor is developed for shape reconstruction under the inspiration of sketch drawing that uses the density of sketch lines to draw light and shadow, resulting in the creation of a 3D-view effect. Tac…

Cited by 1SourceScholar
2024

ViTacTip: Design and Verification of a Novel Biomimetic Physical Vision-Tactile Fusion Sensor

ICRA 2024poster

Tactile sensing is significant for robotics since it can obtain physical contact information during manipulation. To capture multimodal contact information within a compact framework, we designed a novel sensor called ViTacTip, which seamlessly integrates both tactile and visual perception capabilit…

Cited by 15SourceScholar
2021

Probabilistic Discriminative Models address the Tactile Perceptual Aliasing Problem

RSS 2021poster

In this paper; our aim is to highlight Tactile Perceptual Aliasing as a problem when using deep neural networks and other discriminative models. Perceptual aliasing will arise wherever a physical variable extracted from tactile data is subject to ambiguity between stimuli that are physically distinc…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar