Amazon and University of Michigan give robots a sense of touch

From warehouse automation to surgical assistance, many real-world applications depend on robots performing delicate, contact-intensive tasks. Often missing in these situations is the sense of touch: robots need to feel the forces on their fingertips to manipulate objects effectively. Despite years of effort, robust and scalable solutions to this problem remain out of reach, especially in industrial settings. One approach has been to use vision-based tactile sensors, in which cameras embedded in soft fingertips capture contact geometry. Researchers have used this approach to estimate object shape and pose, but computing the forces that correlate most with manipulation capabilities remains a…