UIST 2026
NailBender: Exploring Nail Flexion for Haptic Input and Output
ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), 2026
Accepted to UIST 2026 · Paper coming soon
Hi, I’m Xiping Sun.
I’m an M.S.E. Robotics student in the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania.
I graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with a B.S. in Computer Science in May 2025. I was co-advised by Prof. Wenzhen Yuan and Prof. Craig Shultz, working at Robotouch Lab and Interactive Display Lab.
Research interests
My research interests lie at the intersection of tactile sensing, haptics, and human–robot interaction. I explore sensing systems and wearable interfaces that help robots understand physical contact and support intuitive interactions between people and robots.
- Touch sensing
- Wearable devices
- Human–robot interaction
- Contact-rich Manipulation
Past Research
All publicationsDuring my undergraduate studies at UIUC, I worked on the following projects.
HAPTICS 2026
Strain2Force: Compact Nail-Based Sensor for 3DOF Contact Force Estimation
IEEE Haptics Symposium, 2026
Finalist for Best Conference Technical Paper Award
IJRR 2025
A modularized design approach for GelSight family of vision-based tactile sensors
The International Journal of Robotics Research, 2025
* Equal contribution
ICRA 2025
Social Gesture Recognition in spHRI: Leveraging Fabric-Based Tactile Sensing on Humanoid Robots
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025
Personal Interest
In my spare time, I enjoy watching KPL (King Pro League) games. I like exploring new dishes and desserts. I enjoy hanging out with my cat (check out the Fun page 🐾).