Tactile-reactive gripper with an active palm for dexterous manipulation

Designing robotic grippers that integrate rich sensing with low degrees of freedom while maintaining high dexterity remains a critical challenge in robotics. Although high-resolution tactile sensing, particularly vision-based tactile sensing, has advanced considerably and been incorporated into grippers, most prior work has concentrated on fingertips, leaving the functional role of the palm largely overlooked. Moreover, the potential of the palm to provide actuation alongside support and tactile feedback still remains underexplored. Herein, this work introduces a tactile-reactive gripper that integrates an active tactile palm capable of both actuation and high-resolution vision-based sensing, together with reconfigurable compliant fingers equipped with fingertip tactile arrays. The resulting architecture enables multi-sensing fusion to support adaptive grasping and contact-rich manipulation through coordinated palm-finger interactions. Extensive evaluations, including YCB benchmarking, diverse in-hand manipulation tasks, fruit-picking, and industrial application cases, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed active tactile palm in enhancing dexterity and sensing, enabling challenging tasks with only seven degrees of freedom. The results provide a new reference for the design of tactile grippers that combine mechanical simplicity with advanced perception and high dexterity.