This paper reviews the current state of the art and outlook in robotic tactile sensing for real-time control of dextrous manipulation. We begin with an overview of human touch sensing capabilities and draw lessons for robotic manipulation. Next, tactile sensor devices are described, including tactile array sensors, force-torque sensors, and dynamic tactile sensors. The information provided by t...

In this paper, a hologram with tactile reactions is presented. The developed system consists of three components; a holographic display, a hand tracker, and a tactile display. The tactile display, which is our original device, produces force on user’s bare hand without any contact by using radiation pressure of airborne ultrasound. It adds the sense of touch to optical images floating in mid-ai...

The reproduced tactile sensation of haptic interfaces usually selectively reproduces a certain object attribute, such as the object's material reflected by vibration and its surface shape by a pneumatic nozzle array. Tactile biomechanics investigates the relation between responses to an external load stimulus and tactile perception and guides the design of haptic interface devices via a tactile...

Neurons in a restricted zone in the precentral gyrus of macaque monkeys respond to tactile, visual, and auditory stimuli. The tactile receptive fields of these multimodal cells are usually located on the face, arm, or upper torso. In the present study, in awake monkeys sitting in a primate chair, the neurons responded to a tactile probe touching the skin within the tactile receptive field. Howe...

Interactive surfaces form an integral component of intelligent environments. In the paper, we describe HapticArmrest, a simple tactile interface that communicates tactual surface characteristic and form of interactive elements on direct touch surfaces. Spatially separating manual touch input and active tactile output allows for the combination of various types of tactile actuators for versatile...

Tactile maps are non-visual substitutes for visual maps for blind and visually impaired people. In [3, 11] we suggested to increase the effectiveness of tactile maps by developing a system that generates assisting utterances to facilitate knowledge acquisition. The utterances are inspired by a corpus of assisting utterances given to tactile map explorers by human assistants. The tactile maps ar...

A tactile system to support severe visually-impaired or blind people in the world for their orientation and navigation had been developed. To optimize the design, some parameters of tactile display device were evaluated. In the present paper, we focused on the reaction time to tactile stimuli. In the test, the stimuli were produced through a vibration belt that was worn around the participants’...

This paper describes a comprehensive tactile sensor systemwhich can cover wide areas of full-body robots. Based on design criteria which are introduced from requirements, we develop two types of tactile sensor elements. One is a multi-valued touch sensor which has multi-level pressure thresholds. It is capable of coveringwide areas of robot surfaces. The other is made of soft, conductive gel, w...

The present study presents a new rendering algorithm for a moving tactile stroke on the palm of the hand placed on a sparse 2D tactor array. Our algorithm utilizes the relation between signal duration and signal onset asynchrony previously proposed for “tactile brush” [1], but extends it by applying 3-actuator phantom sensations and adjusting the sampling rate. We compare our proposed algorithm...

Demonstration learning is a powerful and practical technique to develop robot behaviors. Even so, development remains a challenge and possible demonstration limitations, for example correspondence issues between the robot and demonstrator, can degrade policy performance. This work presents an approach for policy improvement through a tactile interface located on the body of the robot. We introd...