FibTac: a fiber-based pneumatic gripper with embodied tactile sensing

Robots rely on tactile sensing to manipulate objects safely and effectively in complex environments, yet most existing tactile sensors remain limited to planar contact sensing and do not tightly integrate perception with physical manipulation. Inspired by animals that use filamentary appendages such as whiskers for simultaneous sensing and interaction, this work presents FibTac, a fiber-based pneumatic gripper that unifies tactile sensing and grasping within a single embodied system. The design embeds carbon fibers within a silicone elastomer attached to a waterproof housing; pneumatic actuation deforms the elastomer to expand or contract the fibers for grasping, while an internal camera captures fiber-tip motion to provide distributed tactile feedback. FibTac operates reliably in both air and underwater environments, supports payloads up to 186 g, and successfully grasps delicate biological specimens, soft materials, and sub-millimeter granular media. The system further demonstrates robust perception across multiple tasks, including liquid classification, chess-piece recognition, granular media classification, underwater flow estimation, and underwater object classification, achieving accuracies of around 90%. These results demonstrate the potential of fiber-based embodied tactile sensing for perception-driven robotic manipulation.