Sound of Touch: Active Acoustic Tactile Sensing via String Vibrations
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866918344647507968 |
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| author | Yi, Xili Xing, Ying Manchester, Zachary Fazeli, Nima |
| author_facet | Yi, Xili Xing, Ying Manchester, Zachary Fazeli, Nima |
| contents | Distributed tactile sensing remains difficult to scale over large areas: dense sensor arrays increase wiring, cost, and fragility, while many alternatives provide limited coverage or miss fast interaction dynamics. We present Sound of Touch, an active acoustic tactile-sensing methodology that uses vibrating tensioned strings as sensing elements. The string is continuously excited electromagnetically, and a small number of pickups (contact microphones) observe spectral changes induced by contact. From short-duration audio signals, our system estimates contact location and normal force, and detects slip. To guide design and interpret the sensing mechanism, we derive a physics-based string-vibration simulator that predicts how contact position and force shift vibration modes. Experiments demonstrate millimeter-scale localization, reliable force estimation, and real-time slip detection. Our contributions are: (i) a lightweight, scalable string-based tactile sensing hardware concept for instrumenting extended robot surfaces; (ii) a physics-grounded simulation and analysis tool for contact-induced spectral shifts; and (iii) a real-time inference pipeline that maps vibration measurements to contact state. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_16846 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Sound of Touch: Active Acoustic Tactile Sensing via String Vibrations Yi, Xili Xing, Ying Manchester, Zachary Fazeli, Nima Robotics Distributed tactile sensing remains difficult to scale over large areas: dense sensor arrays increase wiring, cost, and fragility, while many alternatives provide limited coverage or miss fast interaction dynamics. We present Sound of Touch, an active acoustic tactile-sensing methodology that uses vibrating tensioned strings as sensing elements. The string is continuously excited electromagnetically, and a small number of pickups (contact microphones) observe spectral changes induced by contact. From short-duration audio signals, our system estimates contact location and normal force, and detects slip. To guide design and interpret the sensing mechanism, we derive a physics-based string-vibration simulator that predicts how contact position and force shift vibration modes. Experiments demonstrate millimeter-scale localization, reliable force estimation, and real-time slip detection. Our contributions are: (i) a lightweight, scalable string-based tactile sensing hardware concept for instrumenting extended robot surfaces; (ii) a physics-grounded simulation and analysis tool for contact-induced spectral shifts; and (iii) a real-time inference pipeline that maps vibration measurements to contact state. |
| title | Sound of Touch: Active Acoustic Tactile Sensing via String Vibrations |
| topic | Robotics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16846 |