Ruohan Zhang

Ruohan Zhang

Tactile sensing and perception for stable, generalizable robotic manipulation.

Requirement-Driven Design of Whole-Body Social Tactile Sensing via Virtual Human-Robot Interaction

Published in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026

Dakarai Crowder, Ruohan Zhang, Alexis E. Block, Wenzhen Yuan

arXiv:2607.11690 PDF

Abstract

Tactile sensing for social-physical human-robot interaction (spHRI) is designed in a hardware-driven manner, where predefined sensor configurations constrain coverage, spatial resolution, and the range of recognizable gestures. We propose a requirement-driven framework that derives sensing requirements, specifically spatial resolution and placement, directly from interaction data. Using a VR-based platform with haptic feedback, we collected high-resolution whole-body contact distributions across multiple social scenarios, from which we identified nine recurring social touch gestures. Eight gestures were selected for controlled data collection with 18 participants, yielding an open-source dataset of 5,520 trials. Analysis of contact distributions and simulated tactile encodings provides quantitative baselines for skin coverage and sensor density on a humanoid robot platform. While demonstrated on a single robot platform, the methodology is designed to be transferable to other robot morphologies, potentially enabling morphology-specific sensing requirements to be derived prior to hardware fabrication.

Citation

@inproceedings{crowder2026requirement,
  title         = {Requirement-Driven Design of Whole-Body Social Tactile Sensing via Virtual Human-Robot Interaction},
  author        = {Crowder, Dakarai and Zhang, Ruohan and Block, Alexis E. and Yuan, Wenzhen},
  booktitle     = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  year          = {2026},
  eprint        = {2607.11690},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass  = {cs.RO},
  url           = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11690}
}

Recommended citation: Dakarai Crowder, Ruohan Zhang, Alexis E. Block, Wenzhen Yuan. (2026). "Requirement-Driven Design of Whole-Body Social Tactile Sensing via Virtual Human-Robot Interaction." IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
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