ReSkin / AnySkin

A magnetic tactile skin: a soft pad embedded with magnetic particles sits over a magnetometer that reads contact from field changes.

ReSkin was proposed by Bhirangi, Hellebrekers, Majidi, and Gupta at Carnegie Mellon and Meta AI (FAIR), published at CoRL 2021. It mixes magnetized particles into an elastomer; when the elastomer is deformed by pressure, the magnetic field it produces changes, which a magnetometer circuit underneath measures to estimate contact location and force. The soft skin wears out but is separate from the electronics, so it can simply be swapped for a new one, with self-supervised learning used to adapt to the replacement skin. In 2024, Lerrel Pinto’s group at NYU and collaborators introduced AnySkin, which simplifies fabrication and installation — it snaps onto a gripper or dexterous hand like a phone case — and makes the signal more consistent across different individual skins: the same manipulation policy loses only about 13% performance after a skin swap with AnySkin, versus about 43% with ReSkin. AnySkin’s design files are open-sourced, and it is also available through commercial channels.

ExampleAn AnySkin pad is mounted on the fingertip of a Franka gripper; a policy trained on the tactile signal to plug in a USB cable still mostly works after the pad is swapped for a fresh one.

Also called

ReSkin, AnySkin

Related

Tactile Sensor · Magnetic Tactile Sensing · Electronic Skin · Slip Detection · Tactile Representation Learning · Vision-Based Tactile Sensor

Sources

ReSkin: versatile, replaceable, lasting tactile skins (arXiv 2111.00071)
ReSkin 项目主页 (Chinese)
AnySkin: Plug-and-play Skin Sensing for Robotic Touch 项目主页 (Chinese)

As of

2024-09