OpenTac released an open tactile skin that generates its own fabrication files from a description like 'a size 9 shoe insole'
AspireAI community · arXiv
OpenTac is a resistive tactile skin whose structured deformable overlay converts tangential loading into spatially varying pressure, so differential responses across neighbouring taxels decode local shear vectors while the common-mode response encodes normal force. Around that sensor the authors built a design tool that automatically generates fabrication files from 2D outlines and developable 3D surfaces, including from text prompts such as designing a sensor for a size 9 shoe insole, plus a simulator, cross-sensor transfer and fast or adaptive data acquisition. They fabricated more than 30 sensors across different robot embodiments, characterized the 3D tactile fields against a commercial high-precision force/torque sensor, and showed 3D tactile sensing working for contact-rich feedback control and manipulation policy learning on four real robot embodiments. Adaptive acquisition gives kilohertz-rate partial readouts that exceed full-array raster scanning on the same sensor by 19.2x at 16 sampled taxels per update for a 1024-taxel skin. Hardware, software and videos are open, but the numbers come from the authors' own evaluation.
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