Papers
8
Total Citations
100
H-Index
5
About
Radhen Patel is a roboticist whose work sits at the critical intersection of tactile sensing, in-hand manipulation, and autonomous grasping. His core research focuses on developing novel sensor designs and control strategies that give robots a more human-like sense of touch. Patel’s most influential contribution is the creation of an integrated proximity, contact, and force sensor using a commodity infrared distance sensor embedded in a transparent elastomer. This elegant design, detailed in his 2016 and 2018 papers (garnering 31 and 41 citations respectively), allows a robot to sense an object before contact and then measure the force of the grip after contact, a dual-mode capability critical for delicate manipulation. He extended this sensing paradigm to the domain of dexterous manipulation with his work on the "Tactile-Reactive Roller Grasper," a non-anthropomorphic hand that uses steerable, motorized rolling fingertips to achieve six-degree-of-freedom in-hand object control. Patel’s systems were successfully demonstrated at the IROS 2016 Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition, where his architecture tightly coupled visual and tactile perception to improve grasp performance. His work is foundational for researchers aiming to build more capable, sensor-rich robotic hands.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2
- 3Improving Grasp Performance Using In-Hand Proximity and Contact Sensing9 citations · 2018
- 4Tactile-Reactive Roller Grasper6 citations · 2025
- 5
- 6Improving grasp performance using in-hand proximity and contact sensing3 citations · 2017
- 7Embedded Neural Networks for Robot Autonomy2 citations · 2022
- 8Tactile-Reactive Roller Grasper2 citations · 2023