Unlike humans that rely primarily on vision, Nature has developed versatile sensing modalities such as auditory and touch to perceive shapes and interact with complex environments. This project draws inspiration from the active touch sensing of Nature’s tactile specialists to develop a sensate soft robot that can infer tactile information through a sequence of exploratory movements.
The result of this project equips the skin of soft robots with rich tactile sensing capabilities that can improve their functionality in manipulation, locomotion, and collaborative tasks. This project requires system-level development of hardware and software to integrate actuation, sensing, control, and learning in a unified soft robotic system.
Partners
Max Planck Institute, University of Liverpool, and University of Southern Denmark
Funded by
The Independent Research Fund Denmark through a Sapere Aude: DFF-Starting Grant.
Project period
2021-2026