Fingertip sensitivity for robots

Getting closer to the sense of touch of human skin

Striving to improve touch sensing in robotics, scientists developed a thumb-shaped sensor with a camera hidden inside and trained a deep neural network to infer its haptic contact information. When something touches the finger, the system constructs a three-dimensional force map from the visible deformations of its flexible outer shell. This research invention significantly improves a robot finger’s haptic perception, coming ever closer to the sense of touch of human skin.

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Thumb ticker sm georg 2018 crop small
University of Tübingen
Thumb ticker sm kjkuchenbecker1
IMPRS-IS Spokesperson
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

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