Invited keynotes
Perspectives spanning tactile hardware, learning, and real-world manipulation, with dedicated time for Q&A.
IROS 2026 workshopPittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Scalable Tactile Sensing for Dexterous Manipulation
Bringing hardware, learning, and control together to make touch a core sensing modality for next-generation robotic systems.
01
From human touch
to robot dexterity
Date
Time1:00–5:30 PM
FormatIn person · Half day
Paper deadline
01 / Introduction
Touch is the missing layer of embodied intelligence.
Tactile sensing is a key enabling technology for real-world, general-purpose embodied robotic intelligence. It is essential for detecting contact, estimating physical properties, and responding appropriately during real-world interaction. Yet, despite decades of research, robotic touch still lags far behind human capability in sensing resolution, surface coverage, response speed, robustness, and ease of integration.
Compared with vision, tactile sensing remains less standardized and less widely used, especially for dexterous manipulation, contact-rich control, and data-efficient robot learning. This workshop brings together researchers working on tactile sensor design, contact modeling, simulation, manipulation, robot learning, and multimodal perception to examine how touch can advance robotic dexterity.
The field is moving beyond standalone sensor development toward integrated tactile pipelines that connect hardware, representation learning, control, and real-world deployment. We will focus on scalable tactile skins, tactile simulation, visuo-tactile learning, tactile foundation models, and sim-to-real transfer—especially for complex, changing contacts involving multiple fingers and joints.
02 / Invited speakers
Across sensing, learning, and manipulation.
Confirmed and tentative invited speakers from academia and industry.
03 / Panel discussion
Panelists
A guided discussion on the open questions shaping tactile sensing and dexterity.
Panelist
Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula
Johns Hopkins University
Moderator
Greg Hager
Johns Hopkins University
Coming soon
Additional panelists
More names will be revealed soon.
What we will examine
Four objectives, one shared research agenda.
- 01
Present state-of-the-art advances in tactile sensing hardware, sensor modeling, and large-area tactile skin design.
- 02
Highlight how tactile sensing improves dexterous grasping, in-hand manipulation, contact-rich interaction, and robot adaptation in unstructured environments.
- 03
Connect tactile sensing with robot learning, including self-supervised learning, multimodal policy learning, tactile simulation, and sim-to-real transfer.
- 04
Identify open research challenges and foster a shared research agenda for tactile sensing as a core component of embodied intelligence.
04 / Workshop format
Built for exchange.
Posters & live demos
A coffee-break session featuring up to 20 posters alongside interactive tactile systems and research prototypes.
Contributed spotlights
Up to four selected papers will be invited to give concise 10-minute presentations during the workshop.
Panel & guided debate
Open problems in simulation, multimodal learning, benchmarking, and scalable sensor design—moderated by the organizers.
Early-career researchers are especially encouraged to participate through poster submissions and short contributed talks. Workshop papers are non-archival; work already submitted to or accepted by other venues is welcome.
Discussion-led · Cross-disciplinary · In person05 / Call for papers
Share work that moves touch from the lab into the world.
We welcome 4–8 page papers describing ongoing research, recently completed work, or previously published or concurrently submitted work. Submissions should follow the IROS paper format. The workshop is non-archival, and we particularly encourage early-stage ideas, emerging research directions, system demonstrations, datasets, benchmarks, and work in progress.
Authors of accepted submissions will be invited to present during the poster and demo session. Up to four submissions will also be selected for 10-minute spotlight presentations during the workshop. Submissions will be evaluated by external reviewers, and at least one author of each accepted submission is expected to attend and present in person.
Live demo submissions
Bring the system. Let the room feel the research.
We especially encourage live demonstrations of tactile sensing systems, dexterous manipulation platforms, simulation tools, datasets, and interactive research prototypes.
Demo proposals follow the same 4–8 page format and use the same OpenReview portal. Prefix the submission title with “Live Demo”. Accepted demonstrations will be presented alongside the posters.
Topics of interest
- 01
Scalable tactile sensors, tactile skins, and sensor integration
- 02
Tactile modeling, simulation, synthesis, and sim-to-real transfer
- 03
Tactile perception, representation learning, and multimodal learning
- 04
Tactile-driven grasping, dexterous manipulation, and contact-rich control
- 05
Human demonstrations, wearable sensing, and human-to-robot skill transfer
- 06
Tactile datasets, benchmarks, standardization, and real-world deployment
06 / Organizers
