Tactile sensing provides critical information, such as force, texture, shape or temperature, in manipulation tasks. In particular, tactile sensors traditionally used in robotics are emphasized in contact force determination for grasping control and object recognition. Nevertheless, slip detection is also crucial to successfully manipulate an object. Several approaches have appeared to detect sl...

To investigate whether superior tactile acuity in the blind is due to alterations of attentional selection mechanisms, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were measured in a group of early blind and a group of sighted individuals who performed a difficult tactile spatial selection task. We found systematic differences in the attentional processing of tactile events between early blind and sig...

Dextrous robot hands need to be able to determine the pose of objects to reliably grasp and manipulate them. The first few contacts with an object can be used to provide an initial estimate of this information if we constrain the object to be of a particular class. This paper considers a simple example of exploiting class constraints: finding the axis of an unknown surface of revolution. Three ...

Specialized, bimodal neural systems integrate visual and tactile information in the space near the hand. Here, we show that visuo-tactile representations allow attention to influence early perceptual processing, namely, figure-ground assignment. Regions that were reached toward were more likely than other regions to be assigned as foreground figures, and hand position competed with image-based ...

objective: to investigate the correlation between lower and higher order sensory functions and manual dexterity as well as to identify the sensory measures that could predict manual dexterity in patients with idiopathic parkinson’s disease (pd). materials and methods: in this cross-sectional study, 55 patients with idiopathic pd by mean age of 59.85 ± 11.89 years, and mean hoehn and yahr stage ...

We introduce a novel two-degree-of-freedom haptic display capable of reproducing the sensation of sliding contact on a fingertip. The modular device can be attached to a PHANTOM haptic interface and generates tactile sensations by actuating a ball positioned under the user’s index finger. Specifications for the device and mechanical design considerations are presented. Integration of the slip d...

The stretchable sensor skin we propose uses microwaves propagating in a two-Dimensional Signal Transmission (2DST) sheet. A small tactile sensor chip with a pair of Resonant Proximity Connectors (RPCs) couples with 2D microwaves carrying signals. Chip operating power is also supplied by 2D microwaves. The RPC is a spiral electrode whose arc length is a quarter of the electromagnetic wavelength....