Computer Vision News - February 2023

12 Women in Computer Vision it is in space if it's calibrated. It often has good cameras and can perceive things at a distance. But there's almost nothing like our skin. We know that if you impair the human sense of touch, if you make your skin numb, humans become much worse at manipulating things. It'smuchmoredifficult to brush your hair or do any activities of daily living. Your sense of touch is constantly giving you feedback about your body and your manipulation of the world. We're now starting to see tactile sensing go towards where it could be integrated into a robot. But again, it's complicated how to get it integrated and not and be very lightweight and robust and cheap. There are a lot of technical challenges, and then what can a robot do with that information? We're still in the very early days. It's like when the first cameras were being made. We have some of the first tactile sensors, but it's growing. At every robotics conference that I go to, there are workshops on tactile sensing, and so there's a growing robust community there as well. Another application area I work on a lot is robotic surgery. My PhD advisor helped really growing. It is still not very present in commercial products. But Microsoft announced maybe a year or so ago that they want to add haptics and stylus-based interactions. Also, in virtual reality, I had a start-up for a while. It's now closed. We were too early on giving haptic feedback in virtual reality, but at the time, it wasn't even stabilized on how head-mounted displays would work, what would be the operating standards, and how can this technology work. Now we're starting to see many companies, also research labs, coming up with more feasible approaches for haptic touch feedback that adds to the interaction in virtual reality. Then the third thing I'll highlight is that touch sensing is also a huge gap. Most robots that you can buy have almost no sense of touch. They have proprioception, like their own joint angle sensors. Like a robot knows where Wolfram Scheible The conclusion to all research is: more research is needed!