palpi

This is not the general word for feeling. Senti covers sensation and emotion, and it is what you want for mi sentas malvarmon or mi sentas ĝojon. Palpi is narrower and physical: it is examining something with the hands, deliberately, to find out what it is or where it is. The doctor pressing an abdomen is doing it, the man crossing a black room with one hand on the wall is doing it, and the woman searching a coat pocket is doing it.

Nor is it tuŝi. Touching is contact and can last an instant; palpi is contact with a question behind it, and it is repeated and exploratory. That difference is why the derivations run the way they do: palpado is a going-over by hand, palpebla means tangible, and palpe means by feel, in the dark, without looking.

One warning about the English. Dictionaries gloss this word as grope, and in modern English that word has narrowed almost entirely to the unwanted groping of a person. Esperanto palpi carries none of that by itself; it is neutral, and it is the word a surgeon and a blind man both use. If the unpleasant sense is what you mean, Esperanto makes you spell it out - who was palpated, and that they did not want it - and it is better that the neutral word stays neutral.