Among artificial physical senses, vision and audition have reached human-level performance, whereas touch still lags, despite its key role in enabling intelligent agents to interact physically with the world. Engineering artificial touch is challenging because it requires soft, conformable devices while ensuring high metrological standards in sensor density, sensitivity, and sampling rate. Optical-fiber-based solutions, particularly Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) technology, offer promising developments. FBGs are sensitive to strain and temperature and allow multiple gratings on a single fiber, addressing wiring limitations and enabling high-density tactile meshes for modular robotic skins. Tactile data can be complemented with information on material properties through hyperspectral imaging (HSI), which captures spectral reflectance across visible and non-visible bands, providing an objective and non-destructive material characterization.

Building on these technologies, ARTIS will deliver modular robotic effectors integrating FBG-based tactile sensing with HSI, along with a haptic console equipped with wearable devices enabling kinesthetic and cutaneous telepresence. This bidirectional link will convey multidimensional mechano-thermal interactions and remote perception of distributed stress and strain, roughness, curvature, softness, temperature, and heat flow. Sensory data will contribute to an evolving interaction atlas, publicly available, facilitating the integration of ARTIS datasets with biomechanical models via AI. The integrated test-bed will address a medical scenario using biological tissue phantoms, advancing telepalpation for remote diagnostics and minimally invasive surgery.