ShapeForce: Low-Cost Soft Robotic Wrist for Contact-Rich Manipulation

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 calibration or specialized electronics to obtain exact values, and instead focuses on capturing force and torque changes sufficient for enabling contact-rich manipulation. Extensive experiments across diverse contact-rich tasks and manipulation policies demonstrate that ShapeForce delivers performance comparable to six-axis force-torque sensors at an extremely low cost.