ShapeForce: Low-Cost Soft Robotic Wrist for Contact-Rich Manipulation
Jinxuan Zhu, Zihao Yan, Yangyu Xiao, Jingxiang Guo, Chenrui Tie, Xinyi Cao, Yuhang Zheng, Lin Shao

TL;DR
ShapeForce is an affordable, easy-to-use soft robotic wrist that provides contact feedback by detecting force changes through deformation, enabling effective contact-rich manipulation without expensive sensors.
Contribution
We introduce ShapeForce, a low-cost soft wrist that estimates force-like signals from deformation, eliminating the need for calibration and expensive force-torque sensors.
Findings
Performance comparable to six-axis sensors in contact-rich tasks
Significantly lower cost and easier integration
Effective detection of force changes for manipulation
Abstract
Contact feedback is essential for contact-rich robotic manipulation, as it allows the robot to detect subtle interaction changes and adjust its actions accordingly. Six-axis force-torque sensors are commonly used to obtain contact feedback, but their high cost and fragility have discouraged many researchers from adopting them in contact-rich tasks. To offer a more cost-efficient and easy-accessible source of contact feedback, we present ShapeForce, a low-cost, plug-and-play soft wrist that provides force-like signals for contact-rich robotic manipulation. Inspired by how humans rely on relative force changes in contact rather than precise force magnitudes, ShapeForce converts external force and torque into measurable deformations of its compliant core, which are then estimated via marker-based pose tracking and converted into force-like signals. Our design eliminates the need for…
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Taxonomy
TopicsRobot Manipulation and Learning · Soft Robotics and Applications · Teleoperation and Haptic Systems
