The live demo will demonstrate how the manipulation abilities of a "simple" parallel gripper can be greatly enhanced by the adoption of tactile sensors able to provide the robot with information on contact force and moment as well as spatially distributed pressure. Suitable algorithms will be demonstrated to be able to modulate the grasping force in real-time such that the gripper will be able to safely grasp objects of different size, weight, material with only limited knowledge on the soft contact (friction parameters). Different examples will be presented: human-robot object hand-over, object in-hand pivoting.
The same tactile sensors will be also used for wire manipulation where the spatial information will be of paramount importance to allow the robot to know the exact pose of the grasped wire.