Touch Sensing—Why and Where?

Abstract

Sensory information from several sensory modalities (e.g. touch, vision, hearing etc.) is needed to interact and perceive the environment. The sensorymodal- ity discussed in this book is the ‘sense of touch’—more specifically the ‘tactile sensing’. The touch sensing is different from sensory modalities such as vision, and hearing, as it is distributed over the body and involves physical contactswith the ob- jects. This chapter present few examples that highlight the importance of the ‘sense of touch’ and the impact its ‘effective’ introduction will have on the overall robotics research.