arXiv subjects

Jiasi Gao

Publications and source records attributed to Jiasi Gao.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Let Robots Feel Your Touch: Visuo-Tactile Cortical Alignment for Embodied Mirror Resonance

Observing touch on another's body can elicit corresponding tactile sensations in the observer, a phenomenon termed mirror touch that supports empathy and social perception. This visuo-tactile resonance is thought to rely on structural correspondence between visual and somatosensory cortices, yet robotic systems lack computational frameworks that instantiate this principle. Here we demonstrate that cortical correspondence can be operationalized to endow robots with mirror touch. We introduce Mirror Touch Net, which imposes semantic, distributional and geometric alignment between visual and tactile representations through multi-level constraints, enabling prediction of millimetre-scale tactile signals across 1,140 taxels on a robotic hand from RGB images. Manifold analysis reveals that these constraints reshape visual representations into geometry consistent with the tactile manifold, reducing the complexity of cross-modal mapping. Extending this alignment framework to cross-domain observations of human hands enables tactile prediction and reflexive responses to observed human touch. Our results link a neural principle of visuo-tactile resonance to robotic perception, providing an explainable route towards anticipatory touch and empathic human-robot interaction. Code is available at https://github.com/fun0515/Mirror-Touch-Net.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Jointly Modeling Spatio-Temporal Features of Tactile Signals for Action Classification

Tactile signals collected by wearable electronics are essential in modeling and understanding human behavior. One of the main applications of tactile signals is action classification, especially in healthcare and robotics. However, existing tactile classification methods fail to capture the spatial and temporal features of tactile signals simultaneously, which results in sub-optimal performances. In this paper, we design Spatio-Temporal Aware tactility Transformer (STAT) to utilize continuous tactile signals for action classification. We propose spatial and temporal embeddings along with a new temporal pretraining task in our model, which aims to enhance the transformer in modeling the spatio-temporal features of tactile signals. Specially, the designed temporal pretraining task is to differentiate the time order of tubelet inputs to model the temporal properties explicitly. Experimental results on a public action classification dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in all metrics.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2023

Enable Natural Tactile Interaction for Robot Dog based on Large-format Distributed Flexible Pressure Sensors

Touch is an important channel for human-robot interaction, while it is challenging for robots to recognize human touch accurately and make appropriate responses. In this paper, we design and implement a set of large-format distributed flexible pressure sensors on a robot dog to enable natural human-robot tactile interaction. Through a heuristic study, we sorted out 81 tactile gestures commonly used when humans interact with real dogs and 44 dog reactions. A gesture classification algorithm based on ResNet is proposed to recognize these 81 human gestures, and the classification accuracy reaches 98.7%. In addition, an action prediction algorithm based on Transformer is proposed to predict dog actions from human gestures, reaching a 1-gram BLEU score of 0.87. Finally, we compare the tactile interaction with the voice interaction during a freedom human-robot-dog interactive playing study. The results show that tactile interaction plays a more significant role in alleviating user anxiety, stimulating user excitement and improving the acceptability of robot dogs.

cs.RO↗