SoTa: a tactile skin costing less than $10 that can be shared by both human and robotic hands

Researchers have proposed a flexible capacitive skin covering the entire hand, with the same arrangement of 202 sensors on both humans and robots, to train robots using human demonstrations.

Touching provides robots with contact information that vision alone does not provide, but visual-tactile data is scarce: collecting them involves teleoperating robots. Human demonstrations cost much less, provided that human and robotic hands carry sensors that produce comparable signals. This is the object of SoTa, a capacitive tactile skin described on arXiv.

Same sensor card, two hands

The skin covers the whole hand and retains a common arrangement of 202 measuring points on the fingers and palm, both in humans and robots. Made internally with multi-layered textile electrodes, it comes back to less than $10 in materials per copy. After 10,000 load cycles, it keeps more than 97% of its response range, and its tracks withstand 1,280 fist closures.

On three contact-rich handling tasks, adding touch improves the success rate compared to vision alone. And with constant robotic demonstrations budget, adding human demonstrations more than doubles the average success over eight test conditions.