OpenTac creates customizable 3D tactile skins for enhanced robot touch sensing
OpenTac: An Open Ecosystem for Customizable, Scalable, and Transferable 3D Tactile Sensing
Robotics
Summary
Robots often need to feel objects to pick them up or use them safely, but making tactile sensors that fit different shapes and tasks is hard. The authors created OpenTac, a flexible system that lets people design and build 3D touch sensors that detect forces and shearing like human skin. Their tools can make sensors for varied robot parts, such as hands or feet, and collect touch data quickly. This helps robots learn and adjust to touching objects in the real world.
What this means in practice
- •For robotics engineers: Create custom 3D tactile skins for diverse robot parts to improve touch sensing and manipulation control.
- •For machine learning teams: Collect rapid tactile data from complex sensors to train and deploy manipulation policies in real-world robots.
- •For prosthetics manufacturers: Design adaptive tactile skins for prosthetic devices to enhance sensory feedback and user control.$Commercial implications: Enables customizable tactile skins that can be sold as part of enhanced prosthetic products providing richer touch feedback.
Authors
Ariel Slepyan, Geeta Chandra Raju Bethala, Jiafeng Gu, Anagha Rajendra Dangle, Yinzhe Zhou, Hongyuan Fu, Jade Sim, Tuhin Basu, Xinyi Yin, Md Faizal Karim, Gregory Hager, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Anand Bhattad, Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula, Nitish V. Thakor
Abstract
We present OpenTac, a novel sensor and a full-stack ecosystem for tactile skins that are highly customizable, scalable, and readily deployed in downstream robot control and learning applications. Our core contribution is twofold. First, we develop a scalable resistive tactile skin with a structured deformable overlay that converts tangential loading into spatially varying pressure. Differential responses across neighboring "taxels" support decoding of local shear vectors, and the common-mode response encodes normal force. Second, we provide a highly customizable sensor design tool that is able to automatically generate fabrication files for these tactile skins from 2D outlines and developable 3D surfaces, including from abstract descriptions such as text (e.g., "design a sensor for a size 9 shoe insole"). We develop an ecosystem around the OpenTac sensor, including the CAD design tool, a sensor simulator, cross-sensor transfer, and fast/adaptive data acquisition. We demonstrate the broad applicability of the OpenTac-CAD sensor design tool by designing and fabricating more than 30 sensors across a variety of robot embodiments. We characterize the three-dimensional tactile fields produced by OpenTac with a commercial, high-precision force/torque sensor. We demonstrate the broad applicability of 3D tactile sensing across contact-rich feedback control and manipulation policy learning on four real-world robot embodiments. Additionally, adaptive acquisition enables kilohertz-rate partial readouts, exceeding full-array raster scanning on the same sensor by 19.2X at 16 sampled taxels per update for a 1024-taxel skin. We provide all hardware, software, and result videos are at opentac.github.io