AnySkin: Plug-and-play Skin Sensing for Robotic Touch

TL;DR

AnySkin introduces a versatile, easy-to-attach tactile sensor for robots that enables zero-shot transfer of learned manipulation skills across different sensor instances, simplifying tactile sensing integration.

Contribution

It presents a new adhesive-free, durable tactile sensor with a streamlined fabrication process and demonstrates zero-shot generalization of manipulation policies across sensor instances.

Findings

Zero-shot policy transfer across sensor instances

Comparable performance to DIGIT and ReSkin sensors

Simplified sensor fabrication and integration

Abstract

While tactile sensing is widely accepted as an important and useful sensing modality, its use pales in comparison to other sensory modalities like vision and proprioception. AnySkin addresses the critical challenges that impede the use of tactile sensing -- versatility, replaceability, and data reusability. Building on the simplistic design of ReSkin, and decoupling the sensing electronics from the sensing interface, AnySkin simplifies integration making it as straightforward as putting on a phone case and connecting a charger. Furthermore, AnySkin is the first uncalibrated tactile-sensor with cross-instance generalizability of learned manipulation policies. To summarize, this work makes three key contributions: first, we introduce a streamlined fabrication process and a design tool for creating an adhesive-free, durable and easily replaceable magnetic tactile sensor; second, we characterize slip detection and policy learning with the AnySkin sensor; and third, we demonstrate zero-shot generalization of models trained on one instance of AnySkin to new instances, and compare it with popular existing tactile solutions like DIGIT and ReSkin. Videos of experiments, fabrication details and design files can be found on https://any-skin.github.io/