Fortier-Poisson P, Smith AM. Neuronal activity in somatosensory cortex related to tactile exploration. J Neurophysiol 115: 112–126, 2016. First published October 14, 2015; doi:10.1152/jn.00747.2014.—The very light contact forces ( 0.60 N) applied by the fingertips during tactile exploration reveal a clearly optimized sensorimotor strategy. To investigate the cortical mechanisms involved with th...

Dexterous manipulation is not possible without sensory information about object properties and manipulative forces. Fundamental neuroscience has been unable to demonstrate how information about multiple stimulus parameters may be continuously extracted, concurrently, from a population of tactile afferents. This is the first study to demonstrate this, using spike trains recorded from tactile aff...

Tactile sensing provides critical information, such as force, texture, shape or temperature, in manipulation tasks. In particular, tactile sensors traditionally used in robotics are emphasized in contact force determination for grasping control and object recognition. Nevertheless, slip detection is also crucial to successfully manipulate an object. Several approaches have appeared to detect sl...

This paper reports the design of a tactile sensor patch to cover large areas of robots and machines that interact with human beings. Many devices have been proposed to meet such a demand. These realizations are mostly custom-built or developed in the lab. The sensor of this paper is implemented with commercial force sensors. This has the benefit of a more foreseeable response of the sensor if i...

Problem statement: Sensitization of robot hand is still remaining as crucial issue since most of robot hand systems nowadays are only capable to grasp a predefined specific object. It is still difficult for robot hand system to realize human-like tactile sensation. Some common problems in robot hand system are low accuracy sensing device, sensors are not robust enough for long time work and hea...

Most objects that we manipulate have curved surfaces. We have analyzed how subjects during a prototypical manipulatory task use visual and tactile sensory information for adapting fingertip actions to changes in object curvature. Subjects grasped an elongated object at one end using a precision grip and lifted it while instructed to keep it level. The principal load of the grasp was tangential ...

Vehicle drivers receive tactile feedback from steering-wheel vibration that depends on the frequency and magnitude of the vibration. From an experiment with 12 subjects, equivalent comfort contours were determined for vertical vibration of the hands at two positions with three grip forces. The perceived intensity of the vibration was determined using the method of magnitude estimation over a ra...

Humans have been shown to be good at using active touch to perceive subtle differences in compliance. They tend to use highly stereotypical exploratory strategies, such as applying normal force to a surface. We developed similar exploratory and perceptual algorithms for a mechatronic robotic system (Barrett arm/hand system) equipped with liquid-filled, biomimetic tactile sensors (BioTac(®) from...

14 Sensory information from tactile mechanoreceptors located in the glabrous skin of the hand is 15 crucial for skillful object exploration and manipulation. These mechanoreceptors reliably 16 encode the direction of fingertip forces and the brain certainly relies on this information in both 17 sensorimotor and cognitive tasks. In this study we have examined human ability to discriminate 18 the...