Perception

Tactile Sensing

Tactile sensing is the measurement of physical contact between a robot and its environment, including contact location, normal and shear forces, vibration, and texture. Sensor technologies span resistive and capacitive arrays, barometric taxels, and vision-based sensors such as GelSight and DIGIT, which image the deformation of an illuminated elastomer to recover high-resolution contact geometry. Tactile signals complement vision precisely where cameras fail: under occlusion by the gripper, during in-hand manipulation, and for perceiving properties like friction, slip, and compliance.

Why it matters for physical AI

Contact-rich tasks such as insertion, cable routing, and in-hand reorientation are hard to solve from vision alone, and incorporating touch into learned policies and foundation-model architectures is an active frontier for making manipulation robust in the real world.