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Physical intelligence needs touch, not just vision. eFlesh is a fully 3D-printable magnetic tactile sensor that enables reliable slip detection and contact awareness on real robots, using low-cost hardware and scalable fabrication

Robots Digest 🤖

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243,430 views • 4 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Open-source magnetic tactile sensor for $5! 🧲 Researchers introduced a magnetic tactile sensor that's low-cost, and easy to fabricate, democratizing tactile sensing for robotics. Operating in unstructured environments like homes and offices requires robots to sense forces during physical interaction. Yet the lack of a versatile, accessible tactile sensor has led to fragmented solutions and often force-unaware, sensorless approaches. Building an eFlesh sensor requires four components: a hobbyist 3D printer, off-the-shelf magnets (less than $5), a CAD model, and a magnetometer circuit board. The sensor is 3D printed with magnets embedded in the middle layer. Based on chosen mechanical properties, magnets displace in response to contact forces, measured by a magnetometer underneath. An open-source design tool converts simple OBJ/STL files into 3D-printable STLs. This enables application-specific sensors for robot hands, grippers, quadruped feet, and more. Slip detection generalizes to unseen objects with 95% accuracy. Visual-tactile control policies improve manipulation by 40% over vision-only baselines, achieving 90% success on precise tasks like plug insertion and credit card swiping. All design files, code, trained models, and conversion tools are openly available. Project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Open-source magnetic tactile sensor for $5! 🧲 Researchers introduced a magnetic tactile sensor that's low-cost, and easy to fabricate, democratizing tactile sensing for robotics. Operating in unstructured environments like homes and offices requires robots to sense forces during physical interaction. Yet the lack of a versatile, accessible tactile sensor has led to fragmented solutions and often force-unaware, sensorless approaches. Building an eFlesh sensor requires four components: a hobbyist 3D printer, off-the-shelf magnets (less than $5), a CAD model, and a magnetometer circuit board. The sensor is 3D printed with magnets embedded in the middle layer. Based on chosen mechanical properties, magnets displace in response to contact forces, measured by a magnetometer underneath. An open-source design tool converts simple OBJ/STL files into 3D-printable STLs. This enables application-specific sensors for robot hands, grippers, quadruped feet, and more. Slip detection generalizes to unseen objects with 95% accuracy. Visual-tactile control policies improve manipulation by 40% over vision-only baselines, achieving 90% success on precise tasks like plug insertion and credit card swiping. All design files, code, trained models, and conversion tools are openly available. Project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

287,912 views • 1 month ago

Now all you need to make tactile sensors is a 3D printer, magnets, and magnetometers! [📍It’s open source!] A new tactile sensor, called e-Flesh, with a simple working principle… measure deformations in 3D printable microstructures. Since e-Flesh is 3D printable, you can make it in all shapes and sizes for applications ranging from foot fall sensing to multifingered hands. This is critical in getting touch not just on fingertips, but all around robots. eFlesh can democratize touch sensing with open-sourced❗️ Make your own: Paper:

Now all you need to make tactile sensors is a 3D printer, magnets, and magnetometers! [📍It’s open source!] A new tactile sensor, called e-Flesh, with a simple working principle… measure deformations in 3D printable microstructures. Since e-Flesh is 3D printable, you can make it in all shapes and sizes for applications ranging from foot fall sensing to multifingered hands. This is critical in getting touch not just on fingertips, but all around robots. eFlesh can democratize touch sensing with open-sourced❗️ Make your own: Paper:

Ilir Aliu

154,765 views • 4 months ago

Touch was the missing sense in robotics But FlexiTac is here to change that. An open-source, low-cost, scalable tactile sensor that’s: • ~3 min to fabricate • ~$2.5 per unit • Real-time + ML-ready This is what making hardware actually accessible looks like.

Touch was the missing sense in robotics But FlexiTac is here to change that. An open-source, low-cost, scalable tactile sensor that’s: • ~3 min to fabricate • ~$2.5 per unit • Real-time + ML-ready This is what making hardware actually accessible looks like.

Robots Digest 🤖

12,744 views • 2 months ago

Tactile sensing is gaining traction, but slowly. Why? Because integration remains difficult. But what if adding touch sensors to your robot was as easy as hitting “print”? Introducing eFlesh: a 3D-printable, customizable tactile sensor. Shape it. Size it. Print it. 🧶👇

Tactile sensing is gaining traction, but slowly. Why? Because integration remains difficult. But what if adding touch sensors to your robot was as easy as hitting “print”? Introducing eFlesh: a 3D-printable, customizable tactile sensor. Shape it. Size it. Print it. 🧶👇

Raunaq Bhirangi

85,757 views • 1 year ago

Touch: A Game-Changer in Dexterity for Robots You can’t be responsive to the world if you can’t feel it. That’s true for people—and it's just as true for robots. We’re zeroed in on a practical, yet innovative, approach to creating general purpose robots designed to perform physical work. And that means hands, powered not just by vision, but by touch. Vision alone falls short. There are many instances where our vision is obstructed while performing work tasks–like grabbing items out of a bin–you lose line of sight. You need tactile intelligence—texture, pressure, contact—with real-time feedback to move faster, smarter, and with confidence. Watch a full explainer video on Sanctuary AI’s latest touch sensors on our blog: #Robotics #AI #HumanoidRobots #Dexterity #TactileSensing #SanctuaryAI

Touch: A Game-Changer in Dexterity for Robots You can’t be responsive to the world if you can’t feel it. That’s true for people—and it's just as true for robots. We’re zeroed in on a practical, yet innovative, approach to creating general purpose robots designed to perform physical work. And that means hands, powered not just by vision, but by touch. Vision alone falls short. There are many instances where our vision is obstructed while performing work tasks–like grabbing items out of a bin–you lose line of sight. You need tactile intelligence—texture, pressure, contact—with real-time feedback to move faster, smarter, and with confidence. Watch a full explainer video on Sanctuary AI’s latest touch sensors on our blog: #Robotics #AI #HumanoidRobots #Dexterity #TactileSensing #SanctuaryAI

Sanctuary AI

53,217 views • 1 year ago

Touch alone isn’t enough. 🖐️ For robotics, tactile intelligence truly levels up when touch gains spatial meaning. At #ICRA2026, we dove into the core concept behind SaTA: Spatially-anchored Tactile Awareness for robust, dexterous manipulation. Read it here: The challenge is fundamental: a robot shouldn’t just register a touch, it needs to understand exactly where that contact occurs relative to its fingers, joints, and overall hand structure. This is the missing link that turns raw data into precise, real-time adjustments during manipulation. Why does this matter? Because the most complex part of any manipulation task happens when vision is at its least reliable, that final millimeter before insertion, sliding, gripping, or fine-tuning. At Sharpa, this is exactly why we’re building tactile hands and tactile AI in tandem. 🚀 #Sharpa #Robotics #EmbodiedAI #TactileIntelligence #ICRA2026 #DexterousManipulation 📷

Touch alone isn’t enough. 🖐️ For robotics, tactile intelligence truly levels up when touch gains spatial meaning. At #ICRA2026, we dove into the core concept behind SaTA: Spatially-anchored Tactile Awareness for robust, dexterous manipulation. Read it here: The challenge is fundamental: a robot shouldn’t just register a touch, it needs to understand exactly where that contact occurs relative to its fingers, joints, and overall hand structure. This is the missing link that turns raw data into precise, real-time adjustments during manipulation. Why does this matter? Because the most complex part of any manipulation task happens when vision is at its least reliable, that final millimeter before insertion, sliding, gripping, or fine-tuning. At Sharpa, this is exactly why we’re building tactile hands and tactile AI in tandem. 🚀 #Sharpa #Robotics #EmbodiedAI #TactileIntelligence #ICRA2026 #DexterousManipulation 📷

Sharpa

14,772 views • 14 days ago

Can we bring human-like Touch to robots🤖? Introducing our CoRL work on 3D-ViTac. Humans rely on both vision 👁️ and touch 🫳 for complex tasks. With combined visual-tactile sensing, robots can now tackle challenging tasks, like precise in-hand reorientation, fragile objects grasping. Website: #Robotics #CoRL2024 #Touch #tactile #AI #ML

Can we bring human-like Touch to robots🤖? Introducing our CoRL work on 3D-ViTac. Humans rely on both vision 👁️ and touch 🫳 for complex tasks. With combined visual-tactile sensing, robots can now tackle challenging tasks, like precise in-hand reorientation, fragile objects grasping. Website: #Robotics #CoRL2024 #Touch #tactile #AI #ML

Binghao Huang

49,500 views • 1 year ago

🎤 Overheard at #CES2026: Physical AI is moving intelligence from the cloud into the real world, and AMD is powering that shift with a full portfolio that enables robots to sense, decide, and act in real time across industries like healthcare, agriculture, and manufacturing.

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Open-source dexterous hands with fingertip sensors! 🪬 ORCA Dexterity just released three dexterous hand models. Their mission: is to democratize robotic hand dexterity. They're sharing progress on exceptional, low-cost hardware and a software layer from low-level control to robotic hand learning. This is the open-source approach to dexterous manipulation. It has 83 taxels per finger with 0.1 N force detection which pretty is impressive for an open-source design. Tactile sensing is critical for dexterous manipulation, knowing contact forces enables gentle grasping, slip detection, and force-controlled assembly. Also 700g weight for the lite version makes it practical for mounting on robot arms without exceeding payload limits. Lower weight means faster movements and lower torque requirements. Open hardware accelerates robotics by letting researchers and builders modify designs for their specific needs without starting from scratch! ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

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Lukas Ziegler

38,036 views • 3 months ago

Today at Meta FAIR we’re announcing three new cutting-edge developments in robotics and touch perception — and releasing a collection of artifacts to empower the community to build on this work. Details on all of this new work ➡️ 1️⃣ Meta Sparsh is the first general-purpose encoder for vision-based tactile sensing that works across many tactile sensors and many tasks. Trained on 460K+ tactile images using self-supervised learning. 2️⃣ Meta Digit 360 is a breakthrough artificial fingertip-based tactile sensor, equipped with 18+ sensing features to deliver detailed touch data with human-level precision and touch-sensing capabilities. 3️⃣ Meta Digit Plexus is a standardized platform for robotic sensor connections and interactions. It provides a hardware-software solution to integrate tactile sensors on a single robot hand and enables seamless data collection, control and analysis over a single cable. The potential impact of expanding capabilities and components like these for the open source community ranges from medical research to supply chain, manufacturing and much more. We’re excited to continue this work with the broader community.

Today at Meta FAIR we’re announcing three new cutting-edge developments in robotics and touch perception — and releasing a collection of artifacts to empower the community to build on this work. Details on all of this new work ➡️ 1️⃣ Meta Sparsh is the first general-purpose encoder for vision-based tactile sensing that works across many tactile sensors and many tasks. Trained on 460K+ tactile images using self-supervised learning. 2️⃣ Meta Digit 360 is a breakthrough artificial fingertip-based tactile sensor, equipped with 18+ sensing features to deliver detailed touch data with human-level precision and touch-sensing capabilities. 3️⃣ Meta Digit Plexus is a standardized platform for robotic sensor connections and interactions. It provides a hardware-software solution to integrate tactile sensors on a single robot hand and enables seamless data collection, control and analysis over a single cable. The potential impact of expanding capabilities and components like these for the open source community ranges from medical research to supply chain, manufacturing and much more. We’re excited to continue this work with the broader community.

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Introducing Chroma Cloud: an open-source serverless search database that is fast, cost-effective, scalable, and reliable.

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📢 First contact between a frontier model and robots! Gemini Robotics is a SOTA generalist Vision-Language-Action model bringing frontier model intelligence to the physical world. It's an extremely capable model enabling dexterous, steerable, and general robot control. 🧵⬇️

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ROBOTS JUST LEVELED UP THEIR VISION WITH 3D PERCEPTION X-Humanoid unveiled HumanoidOccupancy, a system that lets robots "see" the world in layered 3D using cameras, depth sensors, and LiDAR. It’s like giving them X-ray vision plus a GPS brain, so they can move and reason like humans. Multimodal sensing means robots aren’t just seeing - they’re actually understanding their surroundings. Source: Reborn

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Mario Nawfal

19,055 views • 10 months ago

Excited to share that our work NeuralActuator: Neural Actuation Modeling for Robot Dynamics and External Force Perception has been accepted to #RSS2026! Your robot — even a low-cost one — can feel external forces without torque or tactile sensors. TL;DR: NeuralActuator is a neural actuator model that jointly predicts 1️⃣torque to capture the nonlinear and time-varying current–to–torque relationship of low-cost servos, 2️⃣external contact forces (and force detection gates) for sensorless force perception, 3️⃣and motor conditions that indicate each motor’s operating regime. Here is a fast-forward video clip ⬇️ We are also covering more robots like LeRobot-S101 and Franka Panda. More details coming soon.

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Intelligence Factory is building human intelligence for robots. They train general-purpose manipulation models on human demonstration data (vision, action, and touch), then deploy them in warehouses, grocery stores, and data centers. Congrats on the launch, Yash and Jalaj!

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Axis is officially LIVE on Base. 🔵 Axis is scaling Physical AI for the real world, contributed by everyone. You can control robots in a virtual world, generate training data at scale, and help build the brain behind tomorrow's robots. All from browser. No hardware needed. Start building robotics intelligence today:

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230,105 views • 2 months ago

Touch used to be the final frontier for robots. Not anymore. DM-Hand1 by Hong Kong DaimonRobotics Technology combines vision and tactile sensing, letting machines detect texture, weight shifts, and movement in real time. This changes everything. Not just what robots can hold, but how they interact. They can now sort through clutter, handle fragile objects, and assist in tasks that used to need human touch. That includes healthcare. Elderly care. Rehab. Spaces that were once designed only for people… may not stay that way for long. We’re not just teaching robots to see. We’re teaching them to feel. Would you trust one?

Touch used to be the final frontier for robots. Not anymore. DM-Hand1 by Hong Kong DaimonRobotics Technology combines vision and tactile sensing, letting machines detect texture, weight shifts, and movement in real time. This changes everything. Not just what robots can hold, but how they interact. They can now sort through clutter, handle fragile objects, and assist in tasks that used to need human touch. That includes healthcare. Elderly care. Rehab. Spaces that were once designed only for people… may not stay that way for long. We’re not just teaching robots to see. We’re teaching them to feel. Would you trust one?

Lukas Ziegler

54,455 views • 11 months ago

Introducing TraceVLA: a fully open-source Vision-Language-Action model reimagining spatial-temporal awareness: ✨ 3.5x gains on real robots, SOTA in simulation 💡 Fine-tunes on just 150K trajectories ⚡ Compact 4B model = 7B performance

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39,488 views • 1 year ago

Who can say no to a humanoid robot that can actually feel a hug? 🤖 JQ Industries just built a fabric-based electronic skin for Unitree G1 — covering the torso, hands, and feet. This is not about appearance. It’s about giving robots real tactile sensing and pressure feedback. According to the company, the system includes tactile gloves, upper-body skin, and foot sensors. That means the robot can feel contact through its hands, detect pressure across its body, and use foot feedback to adjust balance. This is the missing layer in most humanoids. Vision alone can’t handle physical interaction. Robots need touch to grip safely, react to humans, and stay stable in real-world environments. JQ says its fiber sensors can detect forces as low as 0.01N, handle up to 3500kPa, and bend below 0.1mm radius. The system can also integrate with Isaac Sim, making tactile data usable for training and deployment. Unitree G1 is already built for manipulation and control — this adds the sensing layer it lacked. JQ says it’s now working with multiple humanoid companies, with some systems already shipping at scale. This is what happens when robots stop just seeing the world — and start physically feeling it.

Who can say no to a humanoid robot that can actually feel a hug? 🤖 JQ Industries just built a fabric-based electronic skin for Unitree G1 — covering the torso, hands, and feet. This is not about appearance. It’s about giving robots real tactile sensing and pressure feedback. According to the company, the system includes tactile gloves, upper-body skin, and foot sensors. That means the robot can feel contact through its hands, detect pressure across its body, and use foot feedback to adjust balance. This is the missing layer in most humanoids. Vision alone can’t handle physical interaction. Robots need touch to grip safely, react to humans, and stay stable in real-world environments. JQ says its fiber sensors can detect forces as low as 0.01N, handle up to 3500kPa, and bend below 0.1mm radius. The system can also integrate with Isaac Sim, making tactile data usable for training and deployment. Unitree G1 is already built for manipulation and control — this adds the sensing layer it lacked. JQ says it’s now working with multiple humanoid companies, with some systems already shipping at scale. This is what happens when robots stop just seeing the world — and start physically feeling it.

RoboHub🤖

10,952 views • 2 months ago