L2S Talk by Melisa Orta Martínez (Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University): The Power of Touch: Human Perception, Haptic Technology, and Future Interactions
Fri 3 July 2026, 10.00 h at INCYTE, AR-NL 002
Our sense of touch is incredibly powerful, fundamental to human experience, and yet still understudied. Touch allows us to perceive the physical world, guide action, support learning and memory, and communicate with one another. The ability to identify and manipulate objects through touch alone is one striking example of the complexity and importance of this sense. In manipulation, tactile and kinesthetic feedback allow us to perceive contact location, shape, compliance, texture, friction, slip, force, and other properties of physical interaction. We use this information to guide precise movements, regulate grasp forces, and monitor changing physical states. Touch also plays a central role in social life: from infancy, humans use touch to communicate, and tactile contact can convey a wide variety of social signals. Touch is not just a supporting sense. It is central to how we explore, act, learn, communicate, and understand the world around us.
Haptic technology seeks to measure, reproduce, augment, and transmit aspects of touch. It is already shaping applications in dexterous teleoperation, surgical training, virtual and augmented reality, gaming, education, automotive safety, assistive technology, and social communication. Yet despite major advances, touch remains difficult to understand and even harder to engineer. Open questions remain about how tactile, kinesthetic, proprioceptive, thermal, and affective information is encoded and perceived, how haptic devices should be designed and evaluated, and which applications can most benefit from meaningful touch feedback.
In this INCYTE Science Talk, we will explore the science of human touch, the technologies that aim to engage it, and the challenges of creating artificial touch experiences. We will look at recent progress in haptics, discuss open questions in perception and device design, and imagine how touch-enabled technology could transform the way people interact with remote environments, digital worlds, machines, and one another
Melisa Orta Martínez is an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where she leads the Social Haptics Robotics and Education (SHRED) Laboratory. Her research combines the areas of robotics, haptics, human-computer interaction, and education. Her main areas of focus and interest are developing low-cost, open-source robotic technology for educational applications and understanding the effects of this technology on learning, as well as studying the sense of touch and developing novel mechanisms for human-machine interaction.
