E-skin and robot skin glossary

Term 01

Robot skin

A tactile sensing surface that helps a robot detect contact, pressure, shear, slip, or interaction events across hands, grippers, arms, or curved body surfaces.

Term 02

Tactile AI

Software and sensing workflows that turn touch data into useful robot signals for grasping, contact response, manipulation, or evaluation analytics.

Term 03

Physical AI

A broad term for AI systems that perceive, reason, and act through physical machines using sensors, models, policies, control, actuation, safety, and measured feedback.

Term 04

Robot learning

The use of data or experience to train robot perception, prediction, or action through demonstrations, rewards, self-supervision, simulation, or multimodal feedback.

Term 05

Humanoid robot

A physical robot whose body plan or capabilities are designed around human-scale environments, often combining mobility, arms, hands or grippers, perception, control, and safety systems.

Term 06

Vision-language-action model

A robot model that uses visual observations and language instructions to produce or condition physical actions; implementations differ in action representation, embodiment, data, and control interface.

Term 07

Robot foundation model

A broadly trained model intended for reuse or adaptation across multiple robot tasks, environments, or embodiments, with the claimed breadth requiring direct transfer evidence.

Term 08

Robot manipulation

The use of a robot arm, hand, gripper, tool, or whole body to intentionally change an object or environment through physical action.

Term 09

E-skin

Electronic skin: a flexible or soft sensor layer designed to measure contact-related signals on non-flat surfaces.

Term 10

Slip detection

Detection of object movement relative to a robot finger or gripper, often using shear, vibration, texture, or event-based tactile signals.

Term 11

Multimodal tactile sensing

A sensor approach that captures more than one stimulus type, such as pressure and temperature, while managing crosstalk and calibration.

Term 12

ROS 2 tactile pipeline

A robotics software path for recording, replaying, transforming, and consuming tactile sensor data with consistent timestamps, frames, and middleware settings.

Term 13

Category context

A conservative explanation of how robot skin terminology, applications, and research context relate without implying product availability.

Term 14

Tactile sensing

The measurement of physical contact through signals such as pressure, normal and shear force, slip, vibration, temperature, deformation, or tactile images.

Term 15

Tactile sensor

A device that converts contact at a robot surface into electrical, optical, magnetic, acoustic, or other measurable observations.

Term 16

Taxel

A spatially indexed tactile sensing element in an array. Unlike a pixel, its physical quantity, response area, crosstalk, and calibration depend on the sensor design.

Term 17

Tactile manipulation

Robot manipulation that uses measured contact to estimate physical state and update grip, pose, trajectory, force, or recovery actions.

Term 18

Contact-rich manipulation

A manipulation setting in which sustained or repeated physical contact is central to task success, as in insertion, surface following, folding, or in-hand reorientation.

Term 19

Visuo-tactile perception

Joint processing of visual and tactile observations to estimate material, contact, pose, stability, or other physical state.

Term 20

Visuo-tactile manipulation

Robot manipulation in which both visual context and measured touch influence actions such as approach, grasp stabilization, insertion correction, or recovery.

Term 21

Tactile representation learning

Learning compact features from tactile observations for downstream perception, prediction, retrieval, or robot-control tasks.

Term 22

Tactile foundation model

A broadly pretrained tactile or multimodal model intended to transfer across multiple downstream tasks, sensors, objects, or embodiments, with the claimed breadth requiring direct evidence.

Term 23

Tactile world model

An action-conditioned model that predicts future tactile state, contact, force-related signals, slip, images, or learned touch representations.

Term 24

Tactile dataset

A versioned collection of tactile observations and metadata, potentially aligned with vision, language, force, robot state, actions, objects, or tasks.

Term 25

Tactile benchmark

A reproducible evaluation contract that defines tactile inputs, tasks, data splits, metrics, baselines, hardware conditions, and version.

Term 26

Whole-body tactile sensing

Distributed contact sensing across large robot surfaces such as hands, arms, torso, or other body regions rather than a single fingertip or gripper pad.

Term 27

Soft tactile sensor

A tactile sensor with a compliant or flexible interface that can conform to contact geometry while measuring deformation or related physical signals.

Term 28

Shear force

Force acting tangentially along a contact surface; in robotic grasping it can provide evidence about load, sliding, and incipient slip.

Term 29

Contact sequence

The ordered tactile observations from one physical press, grasp, or continuous contact event. Keeping sequences intact helps prevent near-duplicate train-test leakage.