ICRA 2025 Workshop on “Towards Human Level Intelligence Vision and Tactile Sensing”

This is the official website for "ViTac 2025: Towards Human Level Intelligence Vision and Tactile Sensing".

Abstract: This is the 6th time for us to organise the ViTac workshop in the ICRA conferences, after ICRA 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023 and 2024 ViTac Workshops. It will also be timely for us to report conclusion of the Special Issue (now called Special Collection) we have organised on Tactile Robotics at the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. The recent trend in embodied intelligence, i.e., intelligence that requires and leverages a physical body of a robot, demands rich physical interactions with the surrounding environment, which cannot be achieved without perception of the environment with vision and tactile sensing. Recent years have seen rapid advancements in tactile sensor development, integration of information from visual and tactile modalities, leveraging vision and tactile sensing in agile grasping and manipulation, and simulations that involve both vision and tactile sensing. It will be timely to bring together the experts and young researchers in the field to discuss these important topics in robotics. This proposed full-day workshop will cover the recent advancements in the area of visuo-tactile sensing and perception, with the aim to empower robots with visual and tactile intelligence. It will further enhance active collaboration and address challenges for this important topic and applications.

Date: Friday 23rd May, 2025 (9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.)
Location: Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta, USA (Meeting Room: 302)

Past Workshops:
ViTac2024, ViTac2023, ViTac2021, ViTac2020, ViTac2019

Invited Speakers

Jitendra Malik
University of California at Berkeley

Jan Peters
Technische Universität Darmstadt

Mark Yim
University of Pennsylvania

Lerrel Pinto
New York University

Yu She
Purdue University

Daolin Ma
Shanghai Jiaotong University

Wenbo Ding
Tsinghua University

Kyungseo Park
Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology

Industry Panel

Kaifeng Zhang
Co-Founder of Sharpa

Alexander Schmitz
CEO of XELA Robotics Co., Ltd.

Heba Khamis
CEO of Contactile

Zaki Hussein
CEO of TouchLab

Jianan Wang
Vice President of Astribot

Key Dates

• Submission Deadline: 15th March, 2025
• Notification of acceptance: 30th March, 2025
• Camera-ready deadline: 15th April, 2025
• Workshop day: Friday May 23rd, 2025

Topics of Interest

• Development of tactile sensors for robot tasks
• Simulation of tactile sensors and Sim2Real learning
• Visual-tactile sensing and perception
• The control and design of robotic visuo-tactile systems for human-robot interaction
• Interactive visuo-tactile perception in robot grasping and manipulation
• Cognitive control of movement and sensory-motor representations with vision and touch
• Bio-inspired approaches and cognitive architectures for the visuo-tactile perception
• Computational methods for processing vision and touch data in robot learning

Tentative Schedule

Organisers

Shan Luo
King's College London

Nathan Lepora
University of Bristol

Wenzhen Yuan
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Rui Chen
Tsinghua University

Hao Su
University of California San Diego

Kaspar Althoefer
Queen Mary University of London

Gordon Cheng
Technische Universität München

Sponsors

Sharpa

Xela Robotics

Astribot

• IEEE RAS Technical Activities Board
• IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Haptics
• IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Cognitive Robotics

Accepted papers

1. Mohammad Amin Mirzaee, Hung-Jui Huang, and Wenzhen Yuan. "Development of a Two-wheel Vision-based Tactile Sensor for Continuous Sensing of Large Surfaces"
2. Arpit Agarwal, Mohammad Amin Mirzaee, Xiping Sun, Wenzhen Yuan. "Modularized Design Framework for Gelsight Family of Sensors"
3. Ruohan Zhang,Uksang Yoo, Yichen Li, Arpit Argawal, and Wenzhen Yuan. "Vision-Based Proprioception and Tactile Sensing for Soft Pneumatic Robots"
4. Dakarai Crowder, Kojo Vandyck, Xiping Sun, James McCann, and Wenzhen Yuan. "Social Gesture Recognition Through Fabric-Based Tactile Sensing"
5. Antonia Bronars, Radu Corcodel, and Devesh Jha. "High-Accuracy Tactile Pose Estimation for Connector Assembly"
6. Hongyu Li, Mingxi Jia, Tuluhan Akbulut, Yu Xiang, George Konidaris, Srinath Sridhar. "Generalizable 6D Object Pose Tracking using Visuo-Haptic Sensing"
7. Niklas Funk, Changqi Chen, Tim Schneider, Georgia Chalvatzaki, Roberto Calandra, Jan Peters. "On the Importance of Tactile Sensing for Imitation Learning: A Case Study on Robotic Match Lighting"
8. Antonia Bronars, Nimrod Gileadi, Jose Enrique Chen, Zilin Si, Francesco Nori, Nicolas Heess, Konstantinos Bousmalis, Maria Bauza. "Leveraging Touch for Dexterous Behavior Discovery and Deployment"
9. Samuel Bello, Ariel Slepyan, Junjun Chen, and Nitish Thakor. "Predicting Kinematics from High-Density Plantar Pressure Sensing"
10. Ariel Slepyan and Nitish Thakor. "PAS: Probabilistic Adaptive Subsampling for Scalable Tactile Skins"
11. Shoaib Aslam, Krish Kumar, Pokuang Zhou, Hongyu Yu, Michael Yu Wang, and Yu She. "DartBot: Overhand Throwing of Deformable Objects with Tactile Sensing and Reinforcement Learning"
12. Yongqiang Zhao, Zhuo Chen, Xuyang Zhang, and Shan Luo. "Sim-to-Real Peg-in-Hole Assembly Learning from Peg-out-Hole Disassembly"
13. Jiaheng Han, Shaoxiong Yao, Kris Hauser. "Estimating High-Resolution Deformable Object Tactile Models using Neural Stiffness Fields"
14. Zhuo Chen, Ni Ou, Xuyang Zhang and Shan Luo. "TransForce: Transferable Force Prediction for Vision-based Tactile Sensors with Sequential Image Translation"
15. Han Xue, Jieji Ren, Wendi Chen, Gu Zhang, Yuan Fang, Guoying Gu, Huazhe Xu, Cewu Lu. "Reactive Diffusion Policy: Slow-Fast Visual-Tactile Policy Learning for Contact-Rich Manipulation"
16. Venkatesh Pattabiraman, Yifeng Cao, Siddhant Haldar, Lerrel Pinto, Raunaq Bhirangi. "Learning Precise, Contact-Rich Manipulation through Uncalibrated Tactile Skins"
17. Jiaqi Jiang∗, Xuyang Zhang∗, Daniel Fernandes Gomes, Thanh-Toan Do and Shan Luo. "RoTipBot: Robotic Handling of Thin and Flexible Objects using Rotatable Tactile Sensors"
18. Zhiyuan Wu, Yongqiang Zhao, and Shan Luo. "ConViTac: Aligning Visual-Tactile Fusion with Contrastive Representations"
19. Hung-Jui Huang, Michael Kaess, and Wenzhen Yuan. "NormalFlow: Fast, Robust, and Accurate Contact-based Object 6DoF Pose Tracking with Vision-based Tactile Sensors"
20. Ruihan Gao, Kangle Deng, Gengshan Yang, Wenzhen Yuan, Jun-Yan Zhu. "Tactile DreamFusion: Exploiting Tactile Sensing for 3D Generation"