PhD story

Teaching robots the language of touch.

My PhD at U2IS, ENSTA Paris (IP Paris), told as a storyboard: the question, the hardware, the models and the experiments, and the engineering skills each step built.

  1. The question

    Robots are moving into hospitals, homes and care settings, where they will touch people. Vision and speech are mature; touch is not. How should a robot sense human touch, and how should it touch back?

    Transferable skillsproblem framingliterature reviewresearch planning

  2. A silicone tactile skin

    I designed, built and calibrated a tactile array embedded in a soft silicone substrate for a humanoid hand, sensitive enough for a caress and robust enough for a firm grip.

    Transferable skillssensor designfabricationcalibrationembedded acquisition

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    A silicone tactile skin

  3. From pressure to meaning

    Real-time models turn raw taxel pressure into hand shape and grasping behaviour, so the robot can tell who is holding it and how (ICSR 2025).

    Transferable skillsreal-time signal processingestimationmachine learning

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    From pressure to meaning

  4. Predicting touch before it happens

    A generative, factorised model of action-conditioned tactile affordance: the robot learns what it should feel when it presses, strokes or grasps, and notices when reality differs.

    Transferable skillsgenerative modelsdataset designPyTorch

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  5. The handshake study

    On a Franka Panda arm, I varied compliance, grip force and synchrony, and measured how natural each handshake felt. Softness and anticipation win (first-author paper, ICRA 2026).

    Transferable skillsexperimental designuser studiesstatisticsrobot control

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    The handshake study

  6. Touch that calms

    A soft pneumatic interface lets a humanoid breathe and beat like a heart under your hand; guided breathing with it reduced reported anxiety (Humanoids 2024, ICSR).

    Transferable skillssoft actuationpneumaticsphysiological measures

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    Touch that calms

  7. Building the community

    I co-organised Beyond Words 1 and 2, the ICSR workshops on the role of touch in social robotics, bringing robotics, neuroscience and design researchers together.

    Transferable skillsevent organisationscientific communication

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    Building the community

  8. What's next

    Scaling the skin to the whole hand and arm, learning on the robot itself, and taking touch-aware robots towards care settings, with open-source software and hardware.

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