Call for contributions

Workshop Objectives

The sense of touch plays an important role in our daily lives from perceiving the environment, grasping and manipulating objects to identifying, learning about and interacting with them. Compensating for the lack of touch with other human senses is difficult. For robotic systems that interact with dynamic environments and objects therein, it is crucial to recognize objects via their physical properties (such as surface texture, stiffness, center of mass, and thermal conductivity) and to be able to safely manipulate them. However, these are difficult to achieve even with advanced vision techniques, which are often marred by occlusion, poor lighting situations, and a lack of precision. As an alternative, tactile sensing can simultaneously provide rich and direct feedback to the robotic systems. Moreover, the robots with the sense of touch need to learn continuously and efficiently from tactile experience and update their models of the objects and environment (Tactile Transfer knowledge). This tactile learning strategy keeps a robot stable and adaptable to respond to new stimuli receiving from the surrounding.

Topics of Interest

Human Sense of Touch  

• Touch physiology from skin to brain
• Haptic Perception o Action and Perception Loop
• Perception for Learning

Tactile Sensing in Robotics 

• Flexible and Stretchable Tactile Sensors
• Multimodal Tactile Sensors
• Pre-touch Sensing 
• Sensor Coverage

Tactile Perception in Robotics 

• Contact Level Information
• Object Level Information 
• Action Level Information o Tactile Information Processing
• Tactile Feature Extraction / Feature Learning

Tactile Learning and Control 

•  Tactile exploration
•  Tactile-based object modeling and recognition
•  Tactile based grasping and in hand manipulation
•  Tactile Transfer Learning o Tactile Human-Robot Interaction

Intended audience

In our proposed workshop we will discuss the most recent approaches in the area of tactile perception and learning in robotic systems. This is a topic that is not widely represented in the general IROS2018 conference. The goal of this workshop is to disseminate results and benefits of novel approaches to a wider audience who is looking for emerging new technologies. We intend to invite well-known experts in the area to attract a larger set of IROS2018 attendees and to be a platform for more junior researchers. This workshop is intended for roboticists working in the areas of tactile sensation, perception, manipulation, and learning in the field of robotics. It is especially aimed at roboticists interested in improving the reliability and autonomy of robotic systems. We hope to bring together outstanding senior and young researchers as well as graduate students to discuss current trends, problems, and opportunities in tactile perception and learning in robotics.

Workshop Schedule