Tactile sensing plays a privileged role in the manipulation chain: it is in direct contact with the world, potentially offering direct observations of shape, motion and force at contact. This potential, however, is in contrast with today robot's limited tactile reasoning, a long-standing challenge in the robotics research community. After decades of advances in sensing instrumentation and processing power, the basic questions remains: How should robots make effective use of sensed contact information? In this talk I will describe efforts in my group to develop planning and control frameworks that exploit tactile feedback, and demonstrate use cases in automated part picking, part handling, and part assembly.
I will discuss research on the essential recursion that is at the heart of autonomy, from assemblers that assemble assemblers, to machines that make machines, to systems that design systems. And I will explore applications of embodying intelligence in autonomous systems in areas including exponential manufacturing, rapid automation, physical reconfigurability, and personal fabrication.