Sensitive fingertips for robots 

Striving to improve touch sensing in robotics, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems developed a thumb-shaped sensor with a camera hidden inside and trained a deep neural network to infer its haptic contact information. The system constantly constructs a force map – where and how things are touching the flexible outer shell of the sensor – and in this way “sees” the contact deformations. This research invention significantly improves a robot finger’s haptic perception, coming ever closer to the sense of touch of human skin, though it works in a completely different way.