Enabling Robotic Touch With Light: Fiber Optic Tactile Sensing From Modulation Mechanisms to Intelligent Perception

Abstract

Fiber optic tactile sensing (FOTS) is regarded as a promising optical approach for tactile perception in intelligent robots due to its advantages, including immunity to electromagnetic interference, high sensitivity, and flexible integration. In this paper, the major modulation mechanisms of FOTS and their evolution in tactile applications are systematically reviewed, with particular emphasis on intensity modulation and wavelength modulation, which represent the most widely used and technologically mature approaches in robotic tactile systems. The current research status and performance characteristics are summarized from the perspectives of physical principles, structural design, and signal demodulation. In addition, the contributions of flexible packaging, array integration, and intelligent algorithms to the improvement of system stability and multimodal recognition capability are comprehensively discussed. FOTS is progressively evolving toward distributed and intelligent sensing architectures, demonstrating significant application potential in robotic skin, wearable devices, and human–machine interaction, thereby providing technical support for the development of highly sensitive and reliable optical tactile systems. Moreover, a continuously updated repository of related papers and code is available at: https://github.com/200010231118/Fiber‐Optic‐Tactile‐Sensing‐FOTS‐for‐Robot‐Perception .