The sense of touch is arguably the most fundamental yet taken-for-granted sensing modality in human physical interactions. It enriches our perception, enabling dexterous manipulation and acting as a safety net. Likewise, robots have been increasingly required to work outside their historical cages and manipulate a growing range of objects. Achieving human-like dexterity in robots is important for their successful blending into our human environments. This requires robots to move beyond basic rigid-object grasping and perform more complex manipulation tasks. In this talk, we will discuss how robots can build an action hierarchy with the sense of touch to acquire and internalise various manipulation skills safely and dexterously, paving the way for physical intelligence for robots.

Yan Wu is the Deputy Head of the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Division at A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R). He is also the Director of Graduate Affairs at A*STAR Graduate Academy. Yan received his BA(Hons) in Engineering from the University of Cambridge in 2007, and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College London in 2013. From Aug 2012, he worked concurrently at the UCL Institute of Child Health as a Research Associate and Great Ormond Street Hospital as a Research Fellow. Since Dec 2013, he has been with  I2R . Yan is the Vice Chair of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society, Singapore Chapter and Member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committees on Cognitive Robotics, Haptics and Neuro-Robotics Systems. He is also the President of the Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence Association. He serves or has served as an Associate Editor at various editorial boards, including IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Conference Editorial Board and IEEE Intelligent Transport Systems Society Conference Editorial Board. Yan is a Senior Member of the IEEE. His research interests include dexterous manipulation, embodied robot learning and interaction, and service and assistive robotics.