mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Soft Biomimetic Optical Tactile Sensing with the TacTip: A Review

arXiv 2105.14455 ↗First posted 30 May 2021cs.ROcited by 14

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Abstract (arXiv)

Reproducing the capabilities of the human sense of touch in machines is an important step in enabling robot manipulation to have the ease of human dexterity. A combination of robotic technologies will be needed, including soft robotics, biomimetics and the high-resolution sensing offered by optical tactile sensors. This combination is considered here as a SoftBOT (Soft Biomimetic Optical Tactile) sensor. This article reviews the BRL TacTip as a prototypical example of such a sensor. Topics include the relation between artificial skin morphology and the transduction principles of human touch, the nature and benefits of tactile shear sensing, 3D printing for fabrication and integration into robot hands, the application of AI to tactile perception and control, and the recent step-change in capabilities due to deep learning. This review consolidates those advances from the past decade to indicate a path for robots to reach human-like dexterity.

Key facts. Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 30 May 2021.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 1; 2023: 3; 2024: 3; 2025: 2; 2026: 4.

14 papers.

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  1. 2024GaussianProperty: Integrating Physical Properties to 3D Gaussians with LMMscited by 20
  2. 2024AnyRotate: Gravity-Invariant In-Hand Object Rotation with Sim-to-Real Touchcited by 18
  3. 2021Tactile Sim-to-Real Policy Transfer via Real-to-Sim Image Translationcited by 17
  4. 2023TouchSDF: A DeepSDF Approach for 3D Shape Reconstruction using Vision-Based Tactile Sensingcited by 15
  5. 2024Snap-it, Tap-it, Splat-it: Tactile-Informed 3D Gaussian Splatting for Reconstructing Challenging Surfacescited by 12
  6. 2026TaF-VLA: Tactile-Force Alignment in Vision-Language-Action Models for Force-aware Manipulationcited by 11
  7. 2023Graph learning in robotics: a surveycited by 5
  8. 2023Attention for Robot Touch: Tactile Saliency Prediction for Robust Sim-to-Real Tactile Controlcited by 2
  9. 2025GelBelt: A Vision-based Tactile Sensor for Continuous Sensing of Large Surfacescited by 2
  10. 2025Text2Touch: Tactile In-Hand Manipulation with LLM-Designed Reward Functionscited by 1
  11. 2022Semi-Supervised Disentanglement of Tactile Contact~Geometry from Sliding-Induced Shearcited by 0
  12. 2026Symmetry-Aware Fusion of Vision and Tactile Sensing via Bilateral Force Priors for Robotic Manipulationcited by 0
2 more
  1. 2026MultiDiffSense: Diffusion-Based Multi-Modal Visuo-Tactile Image Generation Conditioned on Object Shape and Contact Posecited by 0
  2. 2026A 3D-Printable Dataset for Fair Testing and Comparisons of Tactile Sensorscited by 0