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Humans excel at grasping and manipulating an impressive range of objects of different sizes, shapes, and surface properties. This incredible ability is subserved by a refined tactile perception of friction that informs the central nervous system whether the object is firmly grasped or on the verge of falling. In this talk, I will first dive into how minute lateral displacement enables humans to feel the frictional strength of the contact and how far they are from it in order to adjust their grip force in real time. I will then show how these findings are applied to robotic tactile sensors that are able to extract the richness of the contact information. Particularly, I will present an approach to predict object slippage before its onset from coloured images obtained with the tactile sensor Chromatouch.
Laurence Willemet (TU Delft)
Postdoctoral researcher
Laurence Willemet is a postdoctoral researcher at the Cognitive Robotics Department within the Mechanical Faculty of TU Delft, The Netherlands. She earned her PhD degree from Aix-Marseille Université in France. Her doctoral thesis focused on how the soft skin tissues deform to allow a fast perception of friction, necessary for a good regulation of the grasping forces. It received the recognition of the Eurohaptics Society PhD Award. At TU Delft, she is working on grip force regulation in robotics in the quest of finding a compact representation of the deformation to distill tactile features. She believes that finding the primitives of touch is key to enable dexterous manipulation in soft robots.