Low-cost fabrication of flexible tactile sensor arrays.

While for vision and audio the same mass-produced units can be embedded in many different systems from smartphones to robots, tactile sensors have to be built in application-specific shapes and sizes. To use a commercially available tactile sensor, it can be necessary to develop the entire system around an existing sensor model. We present a set of open-source solutions for designing, manufacturing, reading and integrating custom application-specific tactile matrix sensors.

A Dexterous Hand-Arm Teleoperation System Based on Hand Pose Estimation and Active Vision.

Markerless vision-based teleoperation that leverages innovations in computer vision offers the advantages of allowing natural and noninvasive finger motions for multifingered robot hands. However, current pose estimation methods still face inaccuracy issues due to the self-occlusion of the fingers. Herein, we develop a novel vision-based hand-arm teleoperation system that captures the human hands from the best viewpoint and at a suitable distance.

Reinforcement Learning With Vision-Proprioception Model for Robot Planar Pushing.

We propose a vision-proprioception model for planar object pushing, efficiently integrating all necessary information from the environment. A Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is used to extract compact representations from the task-relevant part of the image. With the real-time robot state obtained easily from the hardware system, we fuse the latent representations from the VAE and the robot end-effector position together as the state of a Markov Decision Process.

Crossmodal Pattern Discrimination in Humans and Robots: A Visuo-Tactile Case Study.

The quality of crossmodal perception hinges on two factors: The accuracy of the independent unimodal perception and the ability to integrate information from different sensory systems. In humans, the ability for cognitively demanding crossmodal perception diminishes from young to old age. Here, we propose a new approach to research to which degree the different factors contribute to crossmodal processing and the age-related decline by replicating a medical study on visuo-tactile crossmodal pattern discrimination utilizing state-of-the-art tactile sensing technology and artificial neural networks (ANN).