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Vision, audition, olfactory, tactile and taste are five important senses that human uses to interact with the real world. As facing more and more complex environments, a sensing system is essential for intelligent robots with various types of sensors. To mimic human-like abilities, sensors similar to human perception capabilities are indispensable. However, most research only concentrated on analyzing literature on single-modal sensors and their robotics application.

This study presents a systematic review of five bioinspired senses, especially considering a brief introduction of multimodal sensing applications and predicting current trends and future directions of this field, which may have continuous enlightenments.

This review shows that bioinspired sensors can enable robots to better understand the environment, and multiple sensor combinations can support the robot’s ability to behave intelligently.

The review starts with a brief survey of the biological sensing mechanisms of the five senses, which are followed by their bioinspired electronic counterparts. Their applications in the robots are then reviewed as another emphasis, covering the main application scopes of localization and navigation, objection identification, dexterous manipulation, compliant interaction and so on. Finally, the trends, difficulties and challenges of this research were discussed to help guide future research on intelligent robot sensors.

This study aims to introduce the DoraHand, and the basic capability and performance have been verified in this paper. Besides the idea of sharing modular design and sensor design, the authors want to deliver an affordable and practical dexterous hand to the research area to contribute to the robotic manipulation area.

This paper introduced the DoraHand, a novel scalable and practical modular dexterous hand, which, adopting modular finger and palm design, fully actuated joint and tactile sensors, can improve the dexterity for robotic manipulation and lower the complexity of maintenance. A series of experiments are delivered to verify the performance of the hand and sensor module.

The parameters of the DoraHand are verified and suitable for the research of robotics manipulation area, the sensing capability has been tested with the static experiment and the slip prediction algorithm. And, the advantage of modular design and extensible interface have been verified by the real application.

The authors continue improving the DoraHand and extend it to more different applications. The authors want to make the DoraHand as a basic research platform in the robotic manipulation area.

The DoraHand has been sent to more than ten different research institutes for different research applications. The authors continue working on this hand for better performance, easier usage and more affordability.

This kind of dexterous hand can help researchers get rid of complex physical issues and pay more attention to the algorithm part; it can help to make robotic manipulation work more popular.

The key design in the DoraHand is the modular finger and sensing module. With the special design in mechanical and electrical parts, the authors build reliable hardware and can support the diversity requirement in the robotic manipulation area. The hand with tactile sensing capability can be used in more research and applications with its extensibility.