• News Views Podcast Learn team about contribute republish AIhub resources AIhub events News Views Podcast Learn News Views Podcast Learn The science of human touch - and why it’s so hard to replicate in robots ByPerla Maiolino,University of Oxford Robots now see the world with an ease that once belonged only to science fiction. • They can recognise objects, navigate cluttered spaces and sort thousands of parcels an hour. • But ask a robot to touch something gently, safely or meaningfully, and the limits appear instantly. • As aresearcher in soft roboticsworking on artificial skin and sensorised bodies, I’ve found that trying to give robots a sense of touch forces us to confront just how astonishingly sophisticated human touch really is. • My work began with the seemingly simple question of how robots might sense the world through their bodies. • Develop tactile sensors, fully cover a machine with them, process the signals and, at first glance, you should getsomething like touch.
Article Summaries:
- Researchers at Oxford’s Soft Robotics Lab are tackling the challenge of giving robots a human‑like sense of touch. While current machines excel at visual perception and object manipulation, replicating the complex, active tactile feedback of human skin remains difficult. The team is developing fully covered, sensor‑laden robotic bodies that mimic the diverse mechanoreceptors in human skin, and exploring “local intelligence” that processes touch data directly at the limb level-an approach inspired by octopus arms, which generate movement patterns from distributed neural networks. By integrating compliant materials and distributed sensing, the goal is to enable robots to explore and interact with their environment through touch, moving beyond camera‑centric perception.
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