Sensorimotor Control Strategies for Tactile Robotics

Physical contacts are at the base of each embodied interaction. As for living beings, also robots continuously establish diverse contacts to fulfill their tasks. Over the last decades, one of the bold goals of robotics research has been to provide artificial agents with dexterity and adaptability - typical of biological systems - while interacting with their surroundings. Despite the huge work and the excellent outputs in this field, such capabilities still require hard refinements and studies to be fully delivered on our robots. The scientific contribution to this objective builds upon three pillars: the design of an appropriate embodiment - concerning its morphology, actuation strategy, and sensing technology; feature extraction algorithms from tactile signals to build a perception model of the experience; closed-loop robot control strategies that drive robot decisions according to either raw tactile feedback or perceptual representations.