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

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 to report crossinstance 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; 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. Code, design files, and videos of policy experiments can be found on https://any-skin.github.io