DexSkin: High-Coverage Conformable Robotic Skin for Learning Contact-Rich Manipulation
This work addresses the problem of enabling robots to perform contact-rich manipulation tasks by providing a practical, high-coverage tactile sensing solution, though it is incremental as it builds on existing electronic skin and learning frameworks.
The authors tackled the challenge of replicating human skin's tactile sensing for robots by introducing DexSkin, a soft capacitive electronic skin that provides high-coverage sensing on gripper fingers, enabling successful learning of complex manipulation tasks like object reorientation and elastic band wrapping.
Human skin provides a rich tactile sensing stream, localizing intentional and unintentional contact events over a large and contoured region. Replicating these tactile sensing capabilities for dexterous robotic manipulation systems remains a longstanding challenge. In this work, we take a step towards this goal by introducing DexSkin. DexSkin is a soft, conformable capacitive electronic skin that enables sensitive, localized, and calibratable tactile sensing, and can be tailored to varying geometries. We demonstrate its efficacy for learning downstream robotic manipulation by sensorizing a pair of parallel jaw gripper fingers, providing tactile coverage across almost the entire finger surfaces. We empirically evaluate DexSkin's capabilities in learning challenging manipulation tasks that require sensing coverage across the entire surface of the fingers, such as reorienting objects in hand and wrapping elastic bands around boxes, in a learning-from-demonstration framework. We then show that, critically for data-driven approaches, DexSkin can be calibrated to enable model transfer across sensor instances, and demonstrate its applicability to online reinforcement learning on real robots. Our results highlight DexSkin's suitability and practicality for learning real-world, contact-rich manipulation. Please see our project webpage for videos and visualizations: https://dex-skin.github.io/.