Sensitive Robotics Laboratory
This laboratory research focuses in further developing the Sensitive Robotics approach.
Sensitive Robotics uses mainly contact information to make robots perform smart tasks. It builds on the ideas from Embedded Intelligence.
The contact information in most of the cases is most relevant to the task excecution that other sensor modalities. Therefore, it is assumed that the robot is covered by tactile sensors to perform a given task.
This approach was originally developed by Prof. Eduardo Torres-Jara and applied to robotic manipulation (Sensitive Manipulation). A different type of tactile sensor, with crucial characteristics for robotics, was developed, which enable the developement of new algorithms to perform dexterous robotic manipulation tasks robustly. It was shown that using sensitiviy, instead of precise position contol, is more efective to perform some manipulation tasks.
The original work (Sensitive Manipulation) has been extended to a number areas of robotics that are investigated in this laboratory. Some of the research topics are the following: