Soft Surfaced Vision-Based Tactile Sensing for Bipedal Robot Applications

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Kim, Jaeeun, Lim, Junhee, She, Yu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Kim, Jaeeun
Lim, Junhee
She, Yu
author_facet Kim, Jaeeun
Lim, Junhee
She, Yu
contents Legged locomotion benefits from embodied sensing, where perception emerges from the physical interaction between body and environment. We present a soft-surfaced, vision-based tactile foot sensor that endows a bipedal robot with a skin-like deformable layer that captures contact deformations optically, turning foot-ground interactions into rich haptic signals. From a contact image stream, our method estimates contact pose (position and orientation), visualizes shear, computes center of pressure (CoP), classifies terrain, and detects geometric features of the contact patch. We validate these capabilities on a tilting platform and in visually obscured conditions, showing that foot-borne tactile feedback improves balance control and terrain awareness beyond proprioception alone. These findings suggest that integrating tactile perception into legged robot feet improves stability, adaptability, and environmental awareness, offering a promising direction toward more compliant and intelligent locomotion systems. For the supplementary video, please visit: https://youtu.be/ceJiy9q_2Aw
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_18638
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Soft Surfaced Vision-Based Tactile Sensing for Bipedal Robot Applications
Kim, Jaeeun
Lim, Junhee
She, Yu
Robotics
Legged locomotion benefits from embodied sensing, where perception emerges from the physical interaction between body and environment. We present a soft-surfaced, vision-based tactile foot sensor that endows a bipedal robot with a skin-like deformable layer that captures contact deformations optically, turning foot-ground interactions into rich haptic signals. From a contact image stream, our method estimates contact pose (position and orientation), visualizes shear, computes center of pressure (CoP), classifies terrain, and detects geometric features of the contact patch. We validate these capabilities on a tilting platform and in visually obscured conditions, showing that foot-borne tactile feedback improves balance control and terrain awareness beyond proprioception alone. These findings suggest that integrating tactile perception into legged robot feet improves stability, adaptability, and environmental awareness, offering a promising direction toward more compliant and intelligent locomotion systems. For the supplementary video, please visit: https://youtu.be/ceJiy9q_2Aw
title Soft Surfaced Vision-Based Tactile Sensing for Bipedal Robot Applications
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18638