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. Soft Surfaced Vision-Based Tactile Sensing for Bipedal Robot Applications

    Feb 20, 2026Jaeeun Kim, Junhee Lim, Yu SheRobotic Tactile SensingVision-Based Tactile Sensing

    Department of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906, USA · Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906, USA

  2. Sound of Touch: Active Acoustic Tactile Sensing via String Vibrations

    Feb 18, 2026Xili Yi, Ying Xing, Zachary Manchester +1Tactile SensingRobotic Tactile Sensing

    University of Michigan · MIT

  3. Cross-Modal Visuo-Tactile Representation Learning with Action Chunking Transformers for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Jan 31, 2026Yaohua Liu, Rong Fu, Amir H. Gandomi +2Representation LearningCross-Modal Representation Learning

    Chinese Medicine Guangdong Laboratory, Hengqin, Zhuhai 519031, China · Institute of Collaborative Innovation, University of Macau, Macau 999078, China · Faculty of Engineering & IT, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW 2007, Australia +3

  4. Highly Deformable Proprioceptive Membrane for Real-Time 3D Shape Reconstruction

    Jan 20, 2026Guanyu Xu, Jiaqi Wang, Dezhong Tong +1Tactile Sensing3D Reconstruction

    University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA

  5. External Photoreflective Tactile Sensing Based on Surface Deformation Measurement

    Nov 9, 2025Seiichi Yamamoto, Hiroki Ishizuka, Takumi Kawasetsu +6Tactile SensingContact Force Estimation

    Graduate School of Engineering Science, The University of Osaka, Toyonaka 560-0043, Japan

  6. 3D Cal: An Open-Source Software Library for Depth Reconstruction on Vision-Based Tactile Sensors

    Nov 4, 2025Rohan Kota, Kaival Shah, J. Edward Colgate +1Vision-Based Tactile SensingTactile Sensing

    McCormick School of Engineering, Center for Robotics and Biosystems, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL USA

  7. Vision-Based Tactile Sensing for the Perception of the Object's Compliance and Hardness

    Oct 14, 2025Muxing Huang, Zibin Chen, Weiliang Xu +5Vision-Based Tactile SensingTactile Sensing

    Guangdong Basic Research Center of Excellence for Structure and Fundamental Interactions of Matter, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Nanophotonic Functional Materials and Devices, School of Optoelectronic Science and Engineering, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006, China

  8. Whisker-based Tactile Flight for Tiny Drones

    Oct 3, 2025Chaoxiang Ye, Guido de Croon, Salua HamazaAerial RoboticsTactile Sensing

    BioMorphic Intelligence Lab, Department of Control & Operations, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, TU Delft, The Netherlands · Micro Air Vehicle Lab, Department of Control & Operations, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, TU Delft, The Netherlands

  9. Tactile Gesture Recognition with Built-in Joint Sensors for Industrial Robots

    Aug 17, 2025Deqing Song, Weimin Yang, Maryam Rezayati +1Human-Robot CollaborationConvolutional Neural Networks

    Dep. of Informatics, University of Zurich Switzerland · Institute of Mechatronics systems, Zurich University of Applied Science, Switzerland

  10. Investigating Active Sampling for Hardness Classification with Vision-Based Tactile Sensors

    May 19, 2025Junyi Chen, Frederik Heller, Mario Gómez Andreu +7Active LearningRobotic Tactile Sensing

    Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab, Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt, Germany. · German Research Center for AI (DFKI) · Department of Psychology, University of Giessen, Germany +2

  11. CoinFT: A Coin-Sized, Capacitive 6-Axis Force Torque Sensor for Robotic Applications

    Mar 25, 2025Hojung Choi, Jun En Low, Tae Myung Huh +7Robotic Tactile Sensing

    Stanford University, CA, USA. · University of California Santa Cruz, CA, USA. · Reality Labs Research, Meta Platforms Inc, WA, USA.