Tactile Sensing

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Overview

Tactile sensing studies how to measure contact properties such as force, shape, texture, slip, and material, giving robots information that cameras cannot provide during occlusion or direct interaction. Systems use optical gel sensors, resistive and capacitive arrays, magnetic or fluidic skins, and acoustic or event-based sensors; learning methods range from CNNs and transformers to self-supervised representations and physics-based reconstruction. Researchers evaluate these approaches on force estimation, material recognition, contact localization, slip detection, and manipulation tasks, with growing attention to cross-sensor transfer, tactile simulation, and combining touch with vision, language, or proprioception. A central challenge is making results reliable across sensor designs, contact conditions, and real-world tasks, where calibration, data scarcity, durability, and safety remain important constraints. The field also continues to test when tactile input improves manipulation enough to justify its hardware and integration costs.

Latest papers

CardsList

139 papers18 papers in the last four weeks, down 14% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Contact Status Recognition and Slip Detection with a Bio-inspired Tactile Hand

    Mar 19, 2026Chengxiao He, Wenhui Yang, Hongliang Zhao +3Tactile Sensing for Robotic ManipulationTactile Sensing

    School of Mechanical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China · School of Electronic Science & Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China

  2. 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

  3. TacLoc: Global Tactile Localization on Objects from a Registration Perspective

    Mar 11, 2026Zirui Zhang, Boyang Zhang, Fumin Zhang +1Object Pose EstimationPoint Cloud Registration

  4. 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

  5. NLiPsCalib: An Efficient Calibration Framework for High-Fidelity 3D Reconstruction of Curved Visuotactile Sensors

    Mar 10, 2026Xuhao Qin, Feiyu Zhao, Yatao Leng +2Vision-Based Tactile SensingTactile Sensing

    School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University

  6. 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.

  7. Cable-driven Continuum Robotics: Proprioception via Proximal-integrated Force Sensing

    Mar 8, 2026Gang Zhang, Junyan Yan, Jibiao Chen +1Contact Force EstimationContinuum Robot Shape Estimation

    Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering and T Stone Robotics Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong · Curve Robotics Limited, Hong Kong · Shun Hing Institute of Advanced Engineering and Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center, Hong Kong

  8. 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

  9. SpikingTac: A Miniaturized Neuromorphic Visuotactile Sensor for High-Precision Dynamic Tactile Imprint Tracking

    Feb 27, 2026Tianyu Jiang, Chaofan Zhang, Shaolin Zhang +2Tactile SensingTactile Sensing for Robotic Manipulation

    Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China · State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China +1

  10. 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

  11. TactiVerse: Generalizing Multi-Point Tactile Sensing in Soft Robotics Using Single-Point Data

    Feb 23, 2026Junhui Lee, Hyosung Kim, Saekwang NamTactile SensingSoft Robotics

    Graduate School of Data Science at Kyungpook National University, 41566 Daegu, Republic of Korea · Major in Data Science Convergence

  12. TactEx: An Explainable Multimodal Robotic Interaction Framework for Human-Like Touch and Hardness Estimation

    Feb 21, 2026Felix Verstraete, Lan Wei, Wen Fan +1Tactile SensingHuman-Robot Interaction

    Department of Bioengineering, Imperial-X Initiative, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

  13. 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

  14. 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

  15. 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

  16. 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

  17. 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

  18. 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

  19. 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