Tactile Robotics: Past and Future

TL;DR

This paper offers a historical, generation-based synthesis of tactile robotics, tracing origins from teleoperation to contemporary expansion and using expert reviews as primary data. It identifies four major historical phases and five contemporary themes, analyzing recurring challenges and opportunities for convergence. By outlining near-term trajectories and potential disruptive shifts, it argues that integrating multiple sensing modalities with AI-driven control could unlock human-like dexterity and telepresence at scale. The work also discusses strategic pathways toward commercial adoption and the societal impact of tactile robotics by 2040.

Abstract

What is the future of tactile robotics? To help define that future, this article provides a historical perspective on tactile sensing in robotics from the wealth of knowledge and expert opinion in nearly 150 reviews over almost half a century. This history is characterized by a succession of generations: 1965-79 (origins), 1980-94 (foundations and growth), 1995-2009 (tactile winter) and 2010-2024 (expansion and diversification). Recent expansion has led to diverse themes emerging of e-skins, tactile robotic hands, vision-based tactile sensing, soft/biomimetic touch, and the tactile Internet. In the next generation from 2025, tactile robotics could mature to widespread commercial use, with applications in human-like dexterity, understanding human intelligence, and telepresence impacting all robotics and AI. By linking past expert insights to present themes, this article highlights recurring challenges in tactile robotics, showing how the field has evolved, why progress has often stalled, and which opportunities are most likely to define its future.

Figures (16)

• Figure 1: Bubble plot for the citation counts of review papers in tactile robotics (using the tabularized list of papers in Table \ref{['tab:1']}). The bubble height is the number of citations in 2024 and the bubble size is proportional to the citation total up to 2024. Those with more than 500 citations are colored green, and those also with more than 100 citations in 2024 are colored red to indicate past and present impact. The expert opinion in those papers guides this historical perspective, with author names from key papers displayed.
• Figure 2: Left: Raymond Goertz demonstrating his mechanical telemanipulator. Right: Design of his ANL Model-1 manipulator: motions of the controlling and operating arms follow each other bilaterally. (Images from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Goertz#/media/File:Apf1-06395t.jpg.)
• Figure 3: MIT optical touch sensing system (strickler_design_1966-1). Left: the imprint on the tactile skin is imaged via a fiber-optic bundle viewing a chequerboard pattern on a flexible mirror. Right: tactile images of contacts with various planar shapes. The system transduces touch into a picture on a TV for a human operator. (Images from report by corliss_teleoperator_1968.)
• Figure 4: Marvin Minsky with a robot arm and gripper. The robotic system was constructed with Seymour Papert in Minsky's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory in MIT. It was originally intended to instantiate a "blocks world" task where cubes could be stacked. (Image from the https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/object/GCP-00017594.)
• Figure 5: Ralph Mosher in the G. E. HARDIMAN Exoskeleton (Human Augmentation Research and Development Investigation MANipulation). Right: one arm of the exoskeleton showing the powered gripper. (Images from the https://misci.org/collections-and-research/; reprinted in minsky_telepresence_1980.)