activity
20242026
collaborators

6 papers

cs.RO2026

Towards Artificial Nerves: Biomimetic Optical-Fiber Tactile Sensing for Robots

Laura E. Butcher, Chris J. Ford, Nathan F. Lepora +1

Robotic systems increasingly demand tactile sensing that approaches the adaptability and resolution of human skin to enable dexterous manipulation and safe interaction. OptiTac is…

cs.RO2026

How to Train your Tactile Model: Tactile Perception with Multi-fingered Robot Hands

Christopher J. Ford, Kaichen Shi, Laura Butcher +2

Rapid deployment of new tactile sensors is essential for scalable robotic manipulation, especially in multi-fingered hands equipped with vision-based tactile sensors. However, curr…

cs.RO2026

SoftHand Model-W: A 3D-Printed, Anthropomorphic, Underactuated Robot Hand with Integrated Wrist and Carpal Tunnel

Dhillon B. Merritt, Christopher J. Ford, Haoran Li +4

This paper presents the SoftHand Model-W: a 3D-printed, underactuated, anthropomorphic robot hand based on the Pisa/IIT SoftHand, with an integrated antagonistic tendon mechanism a…

cs.RO2025

Tactile SoftHand-A: 3D-Printed, Tactile, Highly-underactuated, Anthropomorphic Robot Hand with an Antagonistic Tendon Mechanism

Haoran Li, Christopher J. Ford, Chenghua Lu +5

A challenging and important problem for tendon-driven multi-fingered robotic hands is to ensure grasping adaptivity while minimizing the number of actuators needed to provide human…

cs.RO2025

Shear-based Grasp Control for Multi-fingered Underactuated Tactile Robotic Hands

Christopher J. Ford, Haoran Li, Manuel G. Catalano +3

This paper presents a shear-based control scheme for grasping and manipulating delicate objects with a Pisa/IIT anthropomorphic SoftHand equipped with soft biomimetic tactile senso…

cs.RO2024

AnyRotate: Gravity-Invariant In-Hand Object Rotation with Sim-to-Real Touch

Max Yang, Chenghua Lu, Alex Church +6

Human hands are capable of in-hand manipulation in the presence of different hand motions. For a robot hand, harnessing rich tactile information to achieve this level of dexterity…