Hardware

Tactile Skin

Tactile skin is a flexible, large-area array of touch sensors designed to cover curved robot surfaces such as arms, torsos, or fingers, providing distributed contact sensing rather than measurement at a single fingertip. Implementations use capacitive, resistive, piezoelectric, or magnetic taxel grids, often with serialized readout to keep wiring tractable. Whole-body skins enable robots to detect and localize incidental contact anywhere on their structure, not just at the end-effector.

Why it matters for physical AI

Distributed contact awareness underpins safe operation around people and enables whole-arm manipulation strategies, and large-area touch is increasingly viewed as a missing data modality for training more capable manipulation foundation models.