Vision-Based Tactile Sensing

Hybrid force/motion control requires knowledge of the interaction force and of a task frame defining the force- and motion-controlled directions. These quantities are usually obtained from force/torque sensing or model-based residuals, often assuming also a nominal environment model. This work addresses the online estimation of the contact force and a possibly time-varying task frame using only soft optical tactile sensing, under the assumption of locally planar contact with a negligible contact moment. The proposed method maps a single image of the deformed elastomer of a soft optical tactile sensor to observable contact variables: indentation depth, two surface-to-sensor tilt angles, and 3D contact force, each with a per-sample uncertainty estimate. The mapping is learned through a self-labeling acquisition procedure, in which a manipulator imposes controlled contacts while an auxiliary Force/Torque sensor is used offline to provide ground-truth labels. The tactile measurement is then fused with robot proprioceptive data in an Extended Kalman Filter, producing a continuously updated estimate of the contact task frame and of the interaction force. Control experiments with a DigiTac sensor mounted on a UR10 manipulator demonstrate closed-loop contact force regulation against a flat rigid board in linear and angular motion by a human operator, with touch as the only exteroceptive feedback.

Deep-water biological observation is essential for understanding marine organisms and their interactions with the environment. However, conventional optical and acoustic approaches can introduce stimuli that alter animal behavior and bias biological observations. This paper proposes a fluorescence-enhanced whisker array sensing system that pinpoints underwater hydrodynamic sources through local optical readout rather than direct source imaging. Five spatially oriented whiskers, fabricated with nitinol cores and fluorescent urethane shells, are integrated with ultraviolet excitation and a monocular camera. Image enhancement and segmentation are applied to track the whisker deformation. A lightweight convolutional neural network captures temporal and cross-whisker features from 2 s sequences to estimate source localization. Pool experiments achieve a mean spatial localization error of 88 mm, with 73.5 mm in radius and $2.5^\circ$ in angle, across a test region of 600 mm with $\pm30^\circ$. Real-time localization of a moving thruster demonstrates the capability of the proposed method in dynamic scenarios, highlighting its potential for integration into underwater robots for hydrodynamic source detection, localization, and tracking in low-light environments.

Large-scale datasets are essential for training generalist robot control policies. Collecting real-world tactile data is costly and time-consuming, motivating the use of tactile simulations. However, current tactile simulators capture only overall contact geometry and miss fine details like texture. This results in a significant domain shift between simulated and real tactile data. To address this gap, we introduce Norm2Tex, a plug-in method that augments simulations of vision-based tactile sensors with high-frequency surface details from normal map textures. By modifying the target object's depth map before a tactile simulator's rendering pipeline, Norm2Tex seamlessly integrates into different tactile simulators. We also evaluate sim-to-real transfer using material classification and a reinforcement learning task. Our results show that Norm2Tex preserves material-dependent tactile information across domains, improving texture recognition and producing material-dependent control behavior in the real world.

Tactile signals provide direct contact and force measurements that are essential for understanding physical interactions and enabling dexterous robotic manipulation. However, tactile sensing requires direct measurement at contact interfaces, making large-scale data collection reliant on intrusive, costly, and restrictive instrumentation. We present TouchSight, a monocular egocentric vision framework for dense full-hand contact force prediction that leverages 500 hours of pressure-glove recordings and extensive hand-object interaction (HOI) data. To address the appearance gap between gloved training data and bare-hand real-world scenarios, we construct TwinTouch-20H: 20 hours of paired visual data in which generative video models re-render gloved recordings as bare-hand observations against new backgrounds while preserving the original measured tactile labels. TouchSight predicts dense force from both gloved and generated bare-hand videos, outperforms prior contact prediction methods on OakInk2, qualitatively generalizes to natural bare-hand egocentric videos from unseen datasets, and improves consistently as glove supervision scales. These results demonstrate that dense tactile signals can be recovered from egocentric vision alone, without tactile instrumentation at capture time.

Robots need touch to manipulate objects safely and reliably, as many properties, such as softness, texture, and contact stability, are hard to infer from vision alone. However, vision-based tactile sensors yield different observations of the same material due to variations in optics, elastomer properties, and illumination, leading to poor generalization when trained on a single or multiple sensors. We propose a language-guided distillation framework for learning sensor-robust tactile representations. Language encodes high-level semantic properties of touch (e.g., rough, soft, slippery) that remain invariant across sensing hardware, providing a natural sensor-agnostic supervisory signal. We construct a 39K-sample touch-language dataset with human-annotated material labels and train a tactile encoder to align sensor-specific tactile images with language embeddings in a shared semantic space. We evaluate our approach for few-shot learning and cross-sensor transfer and benchmark it on six existing tactile datasets. Our method achieves 95% accuracy in the 100-shot setting, improves cross-sensor transfer by an average of 13.3% accuracy, and yields up to 19% accuracy gains across six existing tactile datasets. These results demonstrate that language-guided distillation enables scalable and hardware-agnostic tactile representation learning. Code and dataset are available at https://mashood3624.github.io/Language_Tactile/

Advances in tactile sensing have made contact-rich perception possible, accelerating progress in robotic manipulation, material understanding, and embodied interaction. However, because optical design, elastomer mechanics, and imaging geometry differ substantially across tactile sensors, models trained on known sensor types can suffer an abrupt performance collapse on unknown sensors. To address this problem, we propose the Brain-Inspired Few-Shot Tactile Adaptation (BIFTA) framework; it draws on the brain's rapid sensory adaptation mechanism to adapt a frozen encoder to an unknown tactile sensor from a small labeled support set. BIFTA preserves pretrained representations through dual-view statistical memory, constructs support-conditioned spectral graphs to repair sensor-dependent feature neighborhoods, and applies uncertainty-gated recurrent propagation to strengthen reliable cross-query evidence. Extensive benchmarks across three tactile datasets show that BIFTA substantially improves adaptation to unknown sensors: with only 10% labeled target data on SITR, it raises mean Sparsh accuracy from 6.86% for the frozen source classifier to 87.09%, exceeding the strongest implemented prior comparison by 47.22 percentage points, and these gains generalize across datasets, pretrained backbones, and tactile tasks. These results validate BIFTA for data-efficient adaptation to unknown tactile sensors and offer a promising route toward tactile models that transfer across heterogeneous hardware.

Automated inspection of small industrial components, including sub-centimetre-scale parts where defects are geometry-driven and poorly resolved by standard optical cameras, calls for sensing modalities that can directly capture fine surface geometry. Vision-based tactile sensors address this need by converting contact imprints into high-resolution image-like data compatible with existing deep-learning pipelines, yet their effective use for industrial anomaly detection (AD) remains largely unexplored. This work systematically evaluates unsupervised AD methods on a real tactile dataset covering five genuine industrial components acquired with a GelSight Mini sensor mounted on a collaborative robot. Four feature-embedding methods, SPADE, PaDiM, FAPM, and InReaCh, are compared under three validations explicitly motivated by the deployment constraints of contact-based sensing: a Good Fraction analysis establishing the minimum number of nominal contacts for stable performance, directly bounded by gel wear since every acquisition degrades the soft interface; a cross-position evaluation assessing generalization across different contact locations observing the same recurring surface pattern; and a low- versus high-resolution comparison evaluating the cost-benefit of higher-resolution tactile acquisition. Overall, this systematic benchmarking study provides practical guidance for researchers and practitioners adopting vision-based tactile sensing for industrial AD and shows how this modality can serve as a viable alternative for industrial quality-control tasks.

Visuotactile sensors reconstruct dense contact geometry from measured surface gradients, but host-based processing increases power consumption and introduces data-transfer delays and variable scheduling latency, limiting the sensing and response speed of robotic systems. To address these limitations, we implement a near-sensor computing framework that includes a spectral Poisson solver as a fully streaming hardware pipeline. The computational core logic has an estimated power consumption of 347 mW and achieves high throughput without data-dependent branching or iterative convergence, thereby providing deterministic latency. Operating at 166 MHz, the pipeline produces the first depth value of each 128x128 frame 35,107 cycles after receiving the first input pixel, corresponding to a fixed latency of 0.211 ms. Across 15 contact geometries, the reconstructed depths differ from a double-precision reference by 0.17 % of the peak contact depth. On-chip decisions based on these reconstructions close a robot protective reflex loop in 28.3 +/- 4.9 ms, compared with 169.9 +/- 27.8 ms for an equivalent host-based loop using the same actuator. These results demonstrate that near-sensor reconstruction can provide accurate, energy-efficient, and deterministic tactile geometry on timescales suitable for rapid robotic contact responses.

Curved tactile fingertips for dexterous manipulation must resolve fine contact geometry, distinguish normal and tangential loads, and capture transient signals. Existing curved vision-based tactile sensors struggle to combine accurate 3D reconstruction, three-axis force estimation, and high-speed processing in a compact form. This article presents FasTac, a curved vision-based tactile sensor integrating multispectral photometric stereo, dynamic-convolution force estimation, and hardware acceleration on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Single-image-sensor simultaneous multispectral imaging provides spatially aligned observations for robust surface normal estimation, followed by boundary-prior fast Poisson depth reconstruction. HyperForce uses position-aware dynamic convolution to model the spatially nonuniform mechanical response of curved elastomers and estimate three-axis forces. The complete image-to-normal-force pipeline is deployed on an FPGA. Experiments show that near-infrared (NIR) illumination and the boundary prior decrease depth mean absolute error (MAE) from 0.2730 mm to 0.0415 mm; HyperForce achieves normalized mean absolute error (NMAE) values of 2.74% and 2.39% for normal and shear forces, respectively; and FPGA deployment shortens processing latency from 3.26 ms on the GPU to 1.09 ms. Multi-object reconstruction, feedback grasping, and vibration measurement validate fine geometric perception, stable force feedback, and dynamic contact sensing.

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) offers major benefits over open and conventional laparoscopic procedures, yet it still lacks tactile feedback for palpation while operating under strict requirements to preserve reliable vision for navigation and safety. In practice, visual feedback is indispensable, and tactile solutions that cannot coexist with vision are difficult to translate into RMIS tools. To address both needs, we introduce MVP-Tac, a compact, vision-based tactile sensor that provides co-located vision and tactile sensing. MVP-Tac uses reflective photoelastic imaging: a thin photoelastic elastomer produces stress-dependent interferograms under contact that are captured by an embedded camera through a miniaturized reflective polariscope. A semi-transparent membrane and controllable illumination enable switching between visual mode and tactile mode, enabling tactile perception without sacrificing vision. We validate MVP-Tac through force calibration in the 0 to 2 N range and demonstrate its potential for tumor palpation via video-based hardness classification on tissue phantoms, achieving 97% accuracy for exposed-tumor classification and 92% accuracy for subdermal-tumor classification. Finally, we conduct a simulated colonoscopy to validate both visual and tactile modalities in a constrained lumen, including vision-guided 3D photomapping of the luminal wall and in situ hardness classification of localized nodules. Overall, MVP-Tac provides a practical path toward restoring clinically useful palpation in RMIS while maintaining essential visual feedback. The design, fabrication, and firmware of MVP-Tac are open-sourced at https://mvp-tac.github.io/

Vision and touch are complementary modalities essential for robotic perception and manipulation. While vision provides global object context, touch offers precise local information at contact points. Integrating these modalities for contact localization, i.e., predicting the location of touch on an object's surface, poses significant challenges due to the need for accurate spatial alignment between tactile data and visual geometry. To address this challenge, we propose VTLoc, a novel visual-tactile framework that localizes contact points from tactile readings using a 3D point cloud as visual input. VTLoc introduces two key components: a geometric multi-modal alignment module, which reconstructs a pseudo-point cloud from fused visual-tactile features and aligns it with the visual point cloud to enforce spatial consistencies across modalities; and an iterative localizing updater, which iteratively refines the predicted contact location using fused visual-tactile features. Evaluated on a new benchmark of 100 real-world objects, VTLoc improves single-touch contact localization by reducing local-to-global correspondence ambiguity.

This paper presents a scalable, open-source visuotactile sensing system for tensegrity robots that enables six-axis wrench estimation and contact detection. The proposed endcap sensor integrates an elastomeric shell, a 3D-printed thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) interface, and a rigid base housing an embedded camera and LED illumination ring. A novel gyroid-infill bonding technique is introduced to form a durable elastomer-TPU interface without adhesives, yielding a lightweight and modular design compatible with large-scale tensegrity structures. A tactile-to-wrench neural network maps shear vector fields to six-dimensional force and torque measurements. Experimental results demonstrate accurate and stable wrench estimation with a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.1531 on static validation data and out-of-domain generalization under dynamic motion. Furthermore, full-system integration on a 12 kg tensegrity robot confirms the sensor's ability to reliably identify ground contacts. The system substantially improves the practicality of tactile feedback for tensegrity robots, offering a low-cost, reproducible, and physically interpretable pathway toward contact-aware proprioception and state estimation. Open source files are available at github.com/Jonathan-Twz/tensegrity-gelfoot

Neuromorphic visuo-tactile sensing offers a promising paradigm for low-latency and low-power robotic perception. However, existing systems still rely heavily on a host computer for event readout, preprocessing, or relaying prior to chip inference. This paper presents GelNeuro, a fully integrated sensing-computing visuo-tactile system that directly pairs a GelSight Mini-based optical tactile front end with the Speck2f neuromorphic system-on-chip (SoC). Contact-induced marker motions are captured as dynamic vision sensor (DVS) events and routed through the on-chip network to a spiking convolutional neural network (SCNN) classifier. To mitigate accuracy degradation during 8-bit deployment, a hardware-aware weight clamping strategy is introduced. Evaluated on a 15-class natural texture recognition task, hardware-in-the-loop testing on the physical chip achieves a 96.3% accuracy within an 80 ms inference window. Notably, the system consumes only 19.6 mW of board-level active power-over three orders of magnitude lower than conventional CPU/GPU baselines on the same benchmark. GelNeuro also exhibits robust generalization across unseen contact depths, demonstrating the viability of direct sensor-to-chip tactile recognition on edge neuromorphic hardware.

Vision-based tactile sensing converts contact-induced surface deformation into images, enabling robots to infer contact forces and fine surface textures that are not accessible through conventional vision alone. However, tactile images are sensor- and physics-specific, so effective architectures often require expert intuition and extensive manual iteration. Existing neural architecture search (NAS) pipelines can reduce this burden, but they are often computationally expensive and restricted to hand-designed search spaces, which limits architectural novelty and diversity. We introduce TacEvo, a self-evolving architecture discovery framework that improves network designs from downstream feedback. TacEvo uses an LLM to generate code-level mutations and crossovers, and a MAP-Elites quality-diversity loop that preserves diverse elite architectures while preferentially reusing prompts that consistently yield improvements. Exploration is guided by two behavioural descriptors, Architectural Diversity and Efficiency Ratio, which encourage coverage across structural variations and compute-size trade-offs. On ViTacTip force regression and grating classification, TacEvo achieves high autonomous generation reliability (96.0%/94.5% trainable) and improves best validation fitness over 20 generations by 56.1%/96.1%. In a 20-seed post-search high-fidelity evaluation, TacEvo matches the expert baseline on force prediction and outperforms it on fine-grained grating classification. These results suggest that LLM-driven self-evolving search constitutes a practical paradigm for AI-assisted scientific discovery in specialised robotic sensing.

Interacting with computers typically relies on traditional input devices such as keyboards, mice, and monitors, which can be cumbersome for users seeking greater mobility. Virtual keyboards have been explored to address these limitations, but they often involve complex setups or expensive equipment. This paper proposes a novel virtual keyboard system that leverages only a standard camera and a paper with a printed keyboard layout. Unlike previous methods requiring complex calibration or special lighting conditions, our approach can work on standard environment using modern computer vision technologies. Combining modern segmentation and detection models with traditional image processing algorithms, we efficiently identify the keyboard region. Touch detection is performed using an algorithm analyzing the color of the user's fingernail. Experiments demonstrated a promising results our proposed solution of keyboard and keystroke detection for practical applications. Participants attended our user study also found the proposed system interesting.

Vision-based tactile sensors (VBTSs) enable robots to infer contact geometry and force-related cues by imaging deformation through an internal camera, yet generalisation across sensor designs remains poorly understood. We present TacVerse, a multi-sensor dataset and benchmark for cross-sensor vision-based tactile perception. The dataset contains 106,800 tactile images from seven VBTSs and supports three downstream tasks: shape classification, grating classification, and force regression. Experiments are conducted under three settings: within-sensor training, zero-shot cross-sensor transfer, and few-shot adaptation. Strong within-sensor performance across all tasks indicates that the collected tactile observations are informative for the target objectives. Direct cross-sensor transfer, however, leads to substantial degradation. Shape classification is comparatively robust, whereas grating classification and force regression are more sensitive to sensor shift. Few-shot adaptation for force regression consistently improves performance on unseen target sensors but does not fully close the gap to within-sensor upper bounds. A representation study further shows that MAE (Masked Autoencoder) pretraining provides the most consistent gains across tasks and sensors. TacVerse provides a controlled testbed for studying sensor shift, data-efficient adaptation, and self-supervised learning in tactile perception.

Perceiving physical contact is fundamental to dexterous manipulation. While robots often rely on dedicated hardware tactile sensors, humans exhibit a remarkable ability to infer contact by integrating visual information with an innate sense of their body's pose and movement. Inspired by this embodied perceptual skill, we investigate whether a robot can learn to infer contact from vision, an approach that also offers a scalable alternative to tactile hardware specifically for binary contact estimation, which faces practical challenges in cost, fragility, and integration. We present NoContactNoWorries, a transformer-based multimodal framework that fuses RGB-D vision with the robot's proprioception to infer binary contact states as a pseudo-tactile signal for hand-object interactions. We validate by training a single contact prediction model on multiple objects and show that the inferred contact signal supports downstream reinforcement learning agents for in-hand object reorientation, generalizing to novel objects. Experiments in both simulation and on a real-world robot validate our approach, highlighting the feasibility of inferring contact from vision and proprioception. Project Page: https://soham2560.github.io/no-contact-no-worries/

Vision-based tactile sensors require high-fidelity simulation for reinforcement learning, yet existing approaches struggle to provide accurate mechanical stress fields within GPU-accelerated robotics platforms. We present TaCauchy, an extensible Finite Element Method (FEM) framework that integrates rigorous physics-based force computation into Isaac Sim. Built on the Unified Incremental Potential Contact (UIPC) solver, TaCauchy directly computes Cauchy stress tensors from hyperelastic constitutive laws and projects them onto contact surfaces to obtain traction forces and pressure distributions, providing mechanical ground truth from first principles rather than empirical estimation. Our framework features automatic mesh generation with geometry-aware adaptive refinement and a modular sensor interface enabling rapid integration of diverse sensors (GelSight Mini, DIGIT, 9DTact) with minimal configuration. Performance benchmarks demonstrate 33.40 FPS for single environments and 555 FPS aggregate throughput across 60 parallel environments, with stress extraction overhead under 1 ms. Physical validation experiments show strong agreement between simulated and real tactile responses across force ranges from 1.2556 N to 4.7332 N, achieving SSIM above 0.93, confirming the framework's capability to provide accurate, physically-grounded force supervision for downstream robotic manipulation tasks.

Estimating full-hand grasp pressure from egocentric video is critical for immersive VR and robotic manipulation, yet dense tactile sensing often relies on intrusive hardware. Existing vision-based methods predominantly rely on planar surfaces or fingertip contacts, failing to generalize to complex 3D object interactions. Therefore, we introduce EgoTactile, a benchmark pairing egocentric video with full-hand pressure supervision for diverse everyday objects, incorporating a bare-hand transfer subset to enable generalization to natural scenarios. Leveraging this benchmark, we first establish EgoPressureFormer as a discriminative baseline. Beyond this, to explicitly address the uncertainty in partial observations, we propose EgoPressureDiff, a conditional diffusion framework that adapts a large-scale pre-trained video diffusion backbone. By combining rich world knowledge priors with a Physically-Informed Feature Rectification layer to inject semantic constraints, our approach effectively infers plausible contact patterns and resolves visual-physical ambiguities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance on the benchmark and robust transferability to in-the-wild scenarios. Our project page is available at https://egotactile.github.io/.

Vision-based tactile sensors (VBTS) recover high-resolution contact geometry but typically rely on opaque elastomer layers that prevent visual transparency, while RGB-D cameras provide global depth perception yet degrade significantly at close range. To address this limitation, we present TransTac, a transparent ultraviolet (UV)-encoded binocular VBTS that integrates visual observation and marker-based tactile reconstruction within a single compact device. The system employs a transparent elastomer embedded with UV-reflective markers and a prior-guided Delaunay stereo matching algorithm for robust sparse triangulation. To reliably detect densely distributed semitransparent markers, we develop a lightweight detector that enables stable localization under contact and deformation. The proposed prior-guided Delaunay matching improves correspondence robustness by approximately 21% compared with global assignment baselines while maintaining high reconstruction accuracy. In semantic evaluation, TransTac achieves up to 83.3% zero-shot recognition accuracy on tactile images, exceeding opaque tactile baselines by approximately 50 percentage points. Embedding analysis further reveals substantially stronger cross-modal alignment with natural images, with class-center similarity increasing from around 0.2 to over 0.77. Controlled near-distance experiments quantify the degradation of RGB-D depth reliability and demonstrate extended geometric coverage enabled by visuo-tactile integration. Finally, a compact prototype is implemented with an approximate hardware cost of $70.

Recent advances in imitation learning and vision-language models highlight the need for high-fidelity tactile perception, with 6-DoF tactile object pose estimation providing a crucial foundation for precise robotic manipulation. We introduce InvariantCloud, a 6-DoF pose estimation framework that leverages the global invariance of surface marker constellations on vision-based tactile sensors. In contrast to recent approaches, our one-shot globally invariant point cloud registration suppresses cumulative drift and overcomes long-standing limitations in accurately estimating yaw (Z-axis) rotation. Experimental verifications show that InvariantCloud achieves superior yaw tracking accuracy and re-localization repeatability compared to existing benchmarks, demonstrating its precision and robustness in long-sequence manipulation tasks.

Manipulating fragile deformable containers, such as disposable plastic cups filled with liquid, demands real-time grip-force adaptation within an extremely narrow force margin: insufficient force causes slip, while excessive force irreversibly deforms the thin wall. Existing approaches struggle to achieve such force-sensitive manipulation tasks. We propose a noise-statistics-based calibration-driven reflex control paradigm with vision-based tactile sensing: by analyzing the sensor's intrinsic noise characteristics (via a brief static-hold-and-unload protocol), we directly derive all controller thresholds, eliminating external force calibration, trial-and-error manual tuning, or material-specific physical models. Instantiating this paradigm, we present TactileReflex, a three-channel closed-loop controller that extracts three image-level proxies, shear intensity ($S_y$), contact intensity ($F_n$), and center of pressure ($C$), from dual visuo-tactile sensors and drives prioritized reflex channels at ~12 Hz for slip suppression, weight-adaptive release, and force protection. Each channel closes the loop directly on its proxy via noise-derived thresholds. Ablation demonstrates that only the full three-channel system is able to prevent irreversible container deformation (5/5 success vs. at most 1/5 for partial configurations). In a dynamic pouring task, fixed-effort baselines fail in all 10 attempts due to pose drift, while TactileReflex achieves 9/10 success across two water volumes. As a self-contained and interpretable controller, TactileReflex can serve as a plug-and-play safety layer beneath high-level manipulation pipelines, including haptic-free VR teleoperation and vision-language-action (VLA) policies.

Tactile sensing plays a key role in robotic manipulation, particularly in tasks like surface inspection. Successful execution requires maintaining contact while accurately tracking object contours. In this work, we propose a Vision-Based Tactile Model Predictive Control (VBT-MPC) framework for robotic contour following using a Vision-Based Tactile Sensor (VBTS) mounted in an eye-in-hand configuration. The proposed controller operates directly in contour features space, thereby avoiding the need for separate pose-estimation modules or complex force-control architectures. We further compare our VBT-MPC with visual-servoing strategies adapted to tactile features, and evaluate contour tracking on objects with diverse geometries and materials in both simulation and real-world experiments.

Observing touch on another's body can elicit corresponding tactile sensations in the observer, a phenomenon termed mirror touch that supports empathy and social perception. This visuo-tactile resonance is thought to rely on structural correspondence between visual and somatosensory cortices, yet robotic systems lack computational frameworks that instantiate this principle. Here we demonstrate that cortical correspondence can be operationalized to endow robots with mirror touch. We introduce Mirror Touch Net, which imposes semantic, distributional and geometric alignment between visual and tactile representations through multi-level constraints, enabling prediction of millimetre-scale tactile signals across 1,140 taxels on a robotic hand from RGB images. Manifold analysis reveals that these constraints reshape visual representations into geometry consistent with the tactile manifold, reducing the complexity of cross-modal mapping. Extending this alignment framework to cross-domain observations of human hands enables tactile prediction and reflexive responses to observed human touch. Our results link a neural principle of visuo-tactile resonance to robotic perception, providing an explainable route towards anticipatory touch and empathic human-robot interaction. Code is available at https://github.com/fun0515/Mirror-Touch-Net.

Egocentric human video data, which captures rich human-environment interactions and can be collected at scale, has become a key driver of embodied intelligence research. However, existing egocentric datasets typically lack tactile sensing, a critical modality that provides direct cues about contact, force, and pressure in human-object interaction. Without such signals, models struggle to learn physically grounded representations of real-world interaction dynamics. While tactile sensors provide these cues, deploying high-quality tactile hardware at scale remains expensive and cumbersome. This raises a central question: can tactile feedback be inferred directly from visual observations, enabling scalable tactile supervision for egocentric video data and supporting physically grounded embodied learning? To enable research in this direction, we introduce EgoTouch, a large-scale multi-view egocentric dataset with dense tactile supervision for bimanual hand-object interaction. EgoTouch comprises 208 manipulation tasks spanning 1,891 episodes in diverse indoor and outdoor environments, with synchronized multi-view RGB (head-mounted egocentric and dual wrist-mounted cameras), bimanual 3D hand pose, and continuous pressure maps from wearable tactile sensors. Building on EgoTouch, we introduce TouchAnything, a baseline multi-view vision-to-touch prediction framework that uses the egocentric view as the primary input and flexibly leverages available wrist-mounted views at inference time. Experiments show that incorporating wrist-mounted views generally improves tactile prediction over egocentric-only input, achieving up to 5.0% relative improvement in Contact IoU and 6.1% relative improvement in Volumetric IoU. We will publicly release the dataset, code, and benchmark.

Training machine learning models for robotic tactile sensing requires vast amounts of data, yet obtaining realistic interaction data remains a challenge due to physical complexity and variability. Simulating tactile sensors is thus a crucial step in accelerating progress. This paper presents SPLIT, a novel method for simulating image-based tactile sensors, with a primary focus on the DIGIT sensor. Central to our approach is a latent space arithmetic strategy that explicitly disentangles contact geometry from sensor-specific optical properties. Unlike methods that require recalibration for every new unit, this disentanglement allows SPLIT to adapt to diverse DIGIT backgrounds and even transfer data to distinct sensors like the GelSight R1.5 without full model retraining. Beyond this adaptability, our approach achieves faster inference speeds than existing alternatives. Furthermore, we provide a calibrated finite element method (FEM) soft-body mesh simulation with variable resolution, offering a tunable trade-off between speed and fidelity. Additionally, our algorithm supports bidirectional simulation, allowing for both the generation of realistic images from deformation meshes and the reconstruction of meshes from tactile images. This versatility makes SPLIT a valuable tool for accelerating progress in robotic tactile sensing research.

Embodied intelligence has advanced rapidly in recent years; however, bimanual manipulation-especially in contact-rich tasks remains challenging. This is largely due to the lack of datasets with rich physical interaction signals, systematic task organization, and sufficient scale. To address these limitations, we introduce the VTOUCH dataset. It leverages vision based tactile sensing to provide high-fidelity physical interaction signals, adopts a matrix-style task design to enable systematic learning, and employs automated data collection pipelines covering real-world, demand-driven scenarios to ensure scalability. To further validate the effectiveness of the dataset, we conduct extensive quantitative experiments on cross-modal retrieval as well as real-robot evaluation. Finally, we demonstrate real-world performance through generalizable inference across multiple robots, policies, and tasks.

Tactile sensing plays a key role in enabling dexterous and reliable robotic manipulation, but realizing this capability requires substantial calibration to convert raw sensor readings into physically meaningful quantities. Despite its near-universal necessity, the calibration process remains ad hoc and labor-intensive. Here, we introduce 3D Cal, an open-source library that transforms a low-cost 3D printer into an automated probing device capable of generating large volumes of labeled training data for calibrating vision-based tactile sensors. 3D Cal also provides an end-to-end, user-friendly pipeline for training custom convolutional networks to produce high-quality depth reconstructions. Using 3D Cal, we systematically explore the relationship between training data volume and spatial reconstruction performance on two commercially available sensors, DIGIT and GelSight Mini, and derive practical, empirically-grounded guidelines for calibrating these sensors. Finally, we demonstrate depth reconstruction performance on the DIGIT and GelSight Mini comparable to state-of-the-art methods, achieving average reconstruction errors of 156 $\mathrm{μm}$ and 205 $\mathrm{μm}$ on unseen objects, respectively. By automating tactile sensor calibration, 3D Cal can accelerate tactile sensing research, simplify sensor deployment, and facilitate the integration of tactile sensing in robotic platforms.

Object compliance perception enables the identification of soft materials, supporting tasks such as fruit detection and assisted medical palpation. Compliance perception requires sensing an object's deformation and contact forces. Existing vision-based tactile sensing for compliance perception usually depends only on force or deformation. However, deformation-based approaches cannot reliably quantify object compliance, while force-based methods are overly sensitive to geometric variations. To address these limitations, this paper presents a framework that fuses temporal force sequences and deformation field information. Specifically, time-varying contact forces are inferred from tactile image sequences via a neural network, while deformation characteristics are encoded using depth maps. Crucially, the temporal force sequence is used as a dynamic force-response feature for compliance recognition. In standard experiments, the force prediction error reaches 0.06 N within a measurement range of 12 N. The proposed method achieves a 98.0% Shore-hardness classification accuracy for samples ranging from 10 HA to 80 HA. In practical scenarios, including abnormal fruit detection and soft matter, the overall accuracy exceeds 98.5%. This method improves the compliance perception ability of artificial tactile systems and facilitates their deployment in embodied perception applications.

Vision-based tactile sensing is widely used in perception, reconstruction, and robotic manipulation, yet collecting large-scale tactile data remains costly due to diverse sensor-object interactions and inconsistencies across sensor instances. Existing approaches to scaling tactile data---simulation and free-form tactile generation---often yield unrealistically rendered signals with poor transfer to highly dynamic real-world tasks. We propose \name, a two-stage controllable tactile image generation framework that generates realistic tactile images conditioned on a single reference tactile image, contact force, and contact pose. By grounding generation in these important physical priors, \name synthesizes realistic samples across different sensors while effectively capturing task-relevant variations. Across a series of downstream tasks and real-world experiments, such as object insertion, imitation learning, and object weighting, the augmented datasets using our approach consistently improve performance and demonstrate practical utility in dynamic real-world settings. Project page: https://dongyuluo.github.io/controltac.