Transformer in Touch: A Survey
It addresses the problem of advancing tactile technology for robotics and AI researchers, but is incremental as it reviews existing work rather than presenting new findings.
This survey outlines the application and development of Transformer models in tactile perception, covering tasks like object recognition and cross-modal generation, and summarizes core methodologies and performance benchmarks.
The Transformer model, initially achieving significant success in the field of natural language processing, has recently shown great potential in the application of tactile perception. This review aims to comprehensively outline the application and development of Transformers in tactile technology. We first introduce the two fundamental concepts behind the success of the Transformer: the self-attention mechanism and large-scale pre-training. Then, we delve into the application of Transformers in various tactile tasks, including but not limited to object recognition, cross-modal generation, and object manipulation, offering a concise summary of the core methodologies, performance benchmarks, and design highlights. Finally, we suggest potential areas for further research and future work, aiming to generate more interest within the community, tackle existing challenges, and encourage the use of Transformer models in the tactile field.