Metallic Ultrasound Waveguides as a Distributed Tactile Sensing Platform for Contact Localization, Force Estimation, and Material Class Discrimination

arXiv:2607.02827v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile sensing is central to how robotic systems interact with the real world, yet current solutions face a tradeoff between sensing area and system complexity. This work investigates metallic ultrasound waveguides as distributed tactile sensors fully interrogated from a single proximal transducer. Using cylindrical indenters, we characterized the acoustic response to single and multi-point contacts with varying forces and contact materials. For s...