TWINS: A Tactile Wearable Isomorphic Arm Networked System for Contact-Rich Manipulation Learning
2026-08-03 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created TWINS, a robot system that learns to do tasks by touching and using the body (like arms and chest), not just grabbing things with its hand. They made a wearable device that a person wears to show the robot how to do these touch-based tasks. This wearable records both movement and touch feeling, which helps the robot learn from examples. Then, the robot can copy these actions using what it learned from the wearable. Their experiments show this system works well for teaching robots tasks involving body contact.
robot learningmanipulationimitation learningtactile sensorswearable devicesbody-surface contactdual-arm robotdemonstration datajoint motionrobotic system
Authors
Takahide Kitamura, Masaki Murooka, Natsuki Yamanobe, Yukiyasu Domae
Abstract
Recent advances in robot learning for manipulation have increased the importance of collecting real-world demonstration data. However, existing robotic systems primarily focus on end-effector manipulation, making it difficult to teach and execute manipulation tasks involving body-surface contact with the arms and chest. This paper presents TWINS (Tactile Wearable Isomorphic Arm Networked System), a robotic system for manipulation involving body-surface contact. TWINS consists of a Wearable Dual-Arm Device, which is worn by the operator, and an Isomorphic Robot with the same joint configuration and external dimensions. Distributed tactile sensors embedded in the chest and arms enable the measurement of body-surface contact synchronized with joint motion. Using the Wearable Dual-Arm Device, we collected demonstrations for four manipulation tasks involving body-surface contact. We then trained imitation learning policies using the collected demonstrations and deployed them on the Isomorphic Robot, enabling manipulation guided by body-surface tactile observations. Experimental results demonstrate that TWINS provides a unified robotic system for demonstration, learning, and execution of manipulation involving body-surface contact. https://mmurooka.github.io/twins-project-page/