Robotic Tactile Sensing

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Overview

Robotic tactile sensing studies how machines can use contact to estimate forces, surface geometry, material properties, and events such as slip. Sensors use optical skins and cameras, resistive or capacitive arrays, magnetic elements, and acoustic or fluidic signals, often paired with learning methods for force estimation and recognition. These capabilities support contact-rich manipulation, grasping, legged locomotion, and surgical tasks; active touch and multimodal fusion help robots decide where and how to make contact. A central challenge is transferring models across sensors and real-world conditions: calibration, durability, sensor variation, and sim-to-real gaps remain obstacles despite progress in shared datasets and physical simulation.

Latest papers

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101 papers15 papers in the last four weeks, up 50% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Static and Dynamic Representations for Tactile Contact-Angle Estimation with Event-Based Sensors

    Jun 2, 2026Yanhui Lu, Efi Psomopoulou, Benjamin Ward-CherrierTactile SensingRobotic Tactile Sensing

    School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology, University of Bristol, U.K.

  2. Haptic Sorter: A Unified Planning Framework for Online Shape Estimation and Real-Time Pose Inference

    May 29, 2026Zhuoyi Lu, Lin Yang, Sri Harsha Turlapati +1Tactile SensingObject Pose Estimation

    School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore

  3. EIT-Pneumatic Hybrid Robotic Skin for Practical and Accurate Force Map Reconstruction

    May 27, 2026Junhwi Cho, Sunggyu Bae, Junghyeon Ma +3Tactile SensingImage Reconstruction

    Mechanical Engineering Department, KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), 34141 Daejeon, Republic of Korea · Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering, DGIST (Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology), 42988 Daegu, Republic of Korea · Mechanical Engineering Department, TU/e (Eindhoven Technical University, 5600 MB Eindhoven, the Netherlands

  4. Magnet-Based Soft Robotic Skin Using a 3D-Printed Multi-Lattice Structure and CNN-Based Tactile Super-Resolution

    May 27, 2026Yunseong Bang, Joowon Park, Suan Sim +3Tactile SensingRobotic Tactile Sensing

    Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering, DGIST (Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology), 42988 Daegu, Republic of Korea · Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, University of Ulsan, 93 Daehak-ro, Nam-gu, 44610 Ulsan, Republic of Korea

  5. Polymander II: an amphibious salamander-inspired robot with contact and flow sensors

    May 23, 2026Qiyuan Fu, Sudong Lee, Andrea Grillo +4Robot LocomotionRobotic Tactile Sensing

    Biorobotics Laboratory, EPFL, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland · CREATE Lab, EPFL, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland · Innobridge Services S`arl, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

  6. IsaacIPC: Coupling High-Fidelity Simulation and Realistic Rendering for Contact-Rich Robotic Systems

    May 23, 2026Qixin Liang, Zhongqing HanContact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobotics Simulation

    Anker Humanoid Lab · Shenzhen, China · The University of Hong Kong +1

  7. Let Robots Feel Your Touch: Visuo-Tactile Cortical Alignment for Embodied Mirror Resonance

    May 14, 2026Tianfang Zhu, Ning An, Rui Wang +4Vision-Based Tactile SensingVisual-to-Tactile Prediction

    Institute for AI Industry Research, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. · MoE Key Laboratory for Biomedical Photonics, Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China. · School of New Media Art and Design, Beihang University, Beijing, China. +1

  8. Robotic Affection -- Opportunities of AI-based haptic interactions to improve social robotic touch through a multi-deep-learning approach

    May 4, 2026Ali Askari, Jens GerkenHuman-Robot InteractionRobotic Tactile Sensing

    TU Dortmund University, Germany

  9. High-Speed, Scalable Sensor Readout for Dexterous Robotic Hands via Shift-Register Multiplexing

    May 2, 2026Jaehoon Kim, Boshi An, Lazaros Christoforidis +3Robotic Tactile Sensing

    Soft Robotics Lab, IRIS, D-MAVT, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. · Integrated Systems Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.

  10. FlexiTac: A Low-Cost, Open-Source, Scalable Tactile Sensing Solution for Robotic Systems

    Apr 30, 2026Binghao Huang, Yunzhu LiTactile SensingTactile Sensing for Robotic Manipulation

    Columbia University

  11. DOT-Sim: Differentiable Optical Tactile Simulation with Precise Real-to-Sim Physical Calibration

    Apr 30, 2026Yang You, Won Kyung Do, Aiden Swann +3Tactile SensingRobotics Simulation

    Stanford University, United States · University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

  12. Improving Sensing Coverage and Compliance of 3D-Printed Artificial Skins Through Multi-Modal Sensing and Soft Materials

    Apr 28, 2026Carson Kohlbrenner, Caleb Escobedo, Sayak Ray +5Robotic Tactile SensingSoft Robotics

    Human Interaction and Robotics [HIRO] Group, University of Colorado Boulder, 1111 Engineering Drive, Boulder, CO USA.

  13. Egocentric Tactile and Proximity Sensors as Observation Priors for Humanoid Collision Avoidance

    Apr 28, 2026Carson Kohlbrenner, Niraj Pudasaini, William Xie +3RL for RoboticsRobotic Tactile Sensing

    University of Colorado Boulder, 1111 Engineering Drive, Boulder, CO USA.

  14. SPLIT: Separating Physical-Contact via Latent Arithmetic in Image-Based Tactile Sensors

    Apr 27, 2026Wadhah Zai El Amri, Nicolás Navarro-GuerreroVision-Based Tactile SensingDisentangled Representation Learning

    Leibniz Universität Hannover, L3S Research Center, Appelstraße 4, Hannover, 30167, Lower Saxony, Germany

  15. FingerEye: Learning Dexterous Manipulation with Continuous Vision-Tactile Sensing

    Apr 22, 2026Zhixuan Xu, Yichen Li, Xuanye Wu +2Dexterous ManipulationRobotic Tactile Sensing

    National University of Singapore · RoboScience · Huazhong University of Science and Technology +1

  16. TouchAnything: Diffusion-Guided 3D Reconstruction from Sparse Robot Touches

    Apr 10, 2026Langzhe Gu, Hung-Jui Huang, Mohamad Qadri +23D ReconstructionRobotic Tactile Sensing

    Tsinghua University · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Carnegie Mellon University

  17. A-SLIP: Acoustic Sensing for Continuous In-hand Slip Estimation

    Apr 9, 2026Uksang Yoo, Yuemin Mao, Jean Oh +1Tactile SensingRobotic Tactile Sensing

    Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

  18. Feel Robot Feels: Tactile Feedback Array Glove for Dexterous Manipulation

    Mar 30, 2026Feiyu Jia, Xiaojie Niu, Sizhe Yang +5Haptic Feedback for Robot TeleoperationRobot Teleoperation

    University of Science and Technology of China · Shanghai AI Laboratory · The Chinese University of Hong Kong +1

  19. Tac2Real: Reliable and GPU Visuotactile Simulation for Online Reinforcement Learning and Zero-Shot Real-World Deployment

    Mar 30, 2026Ningyu Yan, Shuai Wang, Xing Shen +4Robotics SimulationSim-to-Real Transfer

    Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +1

  20. Bayesian Active Object Recognition and 6D Pose Estimation from Multimodal Contact Sensing

    Mar 22, 2026Haodong Zheng, Gabriele M. Caddeo, Andrei C. Jalba +3Object Pose EstimationRobotic Tactile Sensing

  21. GelSphere: An Omnidirectional Rolling Vision-Based Tactile Sensor for Online 3D Reconstruction and Normal Force Estimation

    Mar 14, 2026Seoyeon Lee, Mohammad Amin Mirzaee, Wenzhen YuanVision-Based Tactile SensingTactile Sensing

    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA

  22. An Event-Driven E-Skin System with Dynamic Binary Scanning and real time SNN Classification

    Mar 11, 2026Gaishan Li, Zhengnan Fu, Anubhab Tripathi +2Robotic Tactile SensingTactile Sensing

    Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hongkong, Hongkong SAR, China

  23. Tactile Recognition of Both Shapes and Materials with Automatic Feature Optimization-Enabled Meta Learning

    Mar 9, 2026Hongliang Zhao, Wenhui Yang, Yang Chen +3Robotic Tactile SensingMeta-Learning

    School of Mechanical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China. · State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 10081, China · State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150001, China.

  24. A Robust Antenna Provides Tactile Feedback in a Multi-legged Robot

    Mar 8, 2026Zhaochen J. Xu, Juntao He, Delfin Aydan +5Legged RoboticsRobot Navigation

    All authors are with the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA.

  25. TEGA: A Tactile-Enhanced Grasping Assistant for Assistive Robotics via Sensor Fusion and Closed-Loop Haptic Feedback

    Mar 5, 2026Hengxu You, Tianyu Zhou, Fang Xu +2Haptic Feedback for Robot TeleoperationRobotic Grasping

    All authors are with the Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA. · All authors are with Nvidia

  26. Design, Mapping, and Contact Anticipation with 3D-printed Whole-Body Tactile and Proximity Sensors

    Mar 5, 2026Carson Kohlbrenner, Anna Soukhovei, Caleb Escobedo +2Robotic Tactile SensingRobotic Perception

    All authors are with the Human Interaction and RObotics [HIRO] Group, University of Colorado Boulder, 1111 Engineering Drive, Boulder, CO USA.

  27. HydroShear: Hydroelastic Shear Simulation for Tactile Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning

    Feb 28, 2026An Dang, Jayjun Lee, Mustafa Mukadam +4Sim-to-Real TransferRobotic Tactile Sensing

    Robotics Department, University of Michigan · Amazon Industrial Robotics (AIR)

  28. Acoustic Sensing for Universal Jamming Grippers

    Feb 27, 2026Lion Weber, Theodor Wienert, Martin Splettstößer +2Robotic Tactile SensingTactile Sensing for Robotic Manipulation

    Robotics and Biology Laboratory, Technische Universität Berlin · Science of Intelligence, Research Cluster of Excellence, Berlin · Robotics Institute Germany

  29. Grasp, Slide, Roll: Comparative Analysis of Contact Modes for Tactile-Based Shape Reconstruction

    Feb 26, 2026Chung Hee Kim, Shivani Kamtikar, Tye Brady +2Robotic Tactile SensingContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Amazon Fulfillment Technologies & Robotics, Westborough MA, USA · Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA · Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign IL, USA

  30. Surface-based Manipulation Using Tunable Compliant Porous-Elastic Soft Sensing

    Feb 24, 2026Gayatri Indukumar, Muhammad Awais, Diana Cafiso +2Robotic ManipulationSoft Robotics

    Soft BioRobotics Perception Group at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, 16163, Genova, Italy · University of Genoa, 16126, Genova, Italy · Biorobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pontedera, 56025, Italy +1