Our sense of touch helps us gather information about our surroundings to accomplish our everyday tasks. Despite current advancements in AI research that incorporates vision and sound, touch remains a challenge. This is due to the fact that tactile-sensing data is hard to come by in the outdoors.
To help researchers advance their AI’s tactile-sensing skills rapidly and at scale, a recent Facebook research in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University introduces ReSkin, a new open-source touch-sensing “skin.” ReSkin is a low-cost, adaptable, resilient, and replaceable long-term solution that takes advantage of machine learning and magnetic sensing developments. It uses a self-supervised learning technique to auto-calibrate the sensor, allowing it to be generalized and share data between sensors and systems.
https://preview.redd.it/48c4uiixk9y71.png?width=1168&format=png&auto=webp&s=8b01b51851ef11584235c9d0f3be9a21a3d22eae
Quick 3 Min Read | Project | Paper | Github
We are SynTouch: we've invented the only sensor in the world that endows robots with the ability to replicate the human sense of touch. We use these sensors to make robots and prosthetics that do everything your own fingers do: they enable dexterity, prevent damage, provide awareness, protect humans, and improve product quality.
SynTouch was founded in 2008 by Professor Gerald Loeb, and PhD students Matthew Borzage, Jeremy Fishel, and Nicholas Wettels who were at the University of Southern California. We successfully raised research funds through SBIR grants from the NIH, NSF, DARPA, USDA, and NIST.
SynTouch started with the goal of endowing robotic hands with the ability to perform human-like capabilities: the identification, and manipulation of objects to perform useful tasks. The existence proof that such capabilities are possible is the human hand. We practice biomimetic design and have learned from the human hand what tactile information is useful. This required understanding the sensing capabilities of a human finger: detecting deformations, vibrations, and thermal gradients. It also required an appreciation of the mechanical features of a human fingertip: the shape of the bone, compliance of the skin, presence of fingerprints. These seemingly unimportant features of a human fingertip are all critical for the identification and manipulation of objects. Combining these in a package that is robust and field serviceable led us to develop the BioTac®.
Jumping forward to 2014 we're at the forefront of Machine Touch®; we build our BioTac sensors, and program robots with the intelligence to move them and process the resulting data. We've used BioTacs to enhance prosthetics by creating tactile reflexes, integrated them with a dozen types of dexterous robotic hands, helped international companies determine how their products feel, and sold our sensors to researchers in labs around the world.
We look forward to answering your questions about robots, prosthetics, engineering startups, and the sense of touch. AMA!
Edit: It's 1:00 PDT and we're signing off for the day. Thank you all for your interest in our work and your insightful questions, and the moderators for their assistance getting us setup!
Our company website: http://www.syntouchllc.com has a lot of information if you're looking for details, including our papers, videos, photographs of the robotic and prosthetic systems, and contact information if you want to follow up with us via email. Thank y
... keep reading on reddit ➡We are SynTouch: the world leader in the technology of human touch. We invented the only sensor in the world that endows machines with the ability to replicate the human sense of touch. We call this emerging field Machine Touch. Like machine vision, it requires a combination of sensors and algorithms to take a human sense, capture it and allow us to do useful things with tactile information.
One core application of our technology is quantifying dimensions of touch - we’ve created a taxonomy called the SynTouch Standard® that consists of fifteen dimensions humans feel. The information is captured by our BioTac Toccare® which Automakers, Apparel and Consumer Electronics companies use to define and improve the haptics of their products. Analogous to the use of digital color meters to capture RGB values and drive product manufacturing decisions to ensure they ‘look right’, our technology provides information to ensure products ‘feel right’.
Our technology also functions as the input for haptic displays for VR and telerobotics. This allows us to drive haptic displays with real-world data for anything from a surgical robot to a gaming device – and we’ve worked with both!
We’re also pursuing long-term projects to command robotic hands with tactile sense and reflexes. Our sensors allow robot hands to handle fragile objects better than currently available systems – one prime use case that we’re pursing now deploying this technology in prosthetics to allow amputees to handle fragile objects without dropping or crushing them.
SynTouch was founded in 2008 by Professor Gerald Loeb, and Ph.D. students Matthew Borzage, Jeremy Fishel, and Nicholas Wettels who were at the University of Southern California. We’ve been recognized by Popular Mechanics, The Robot Report, and the World Economic Forum…
Happy to answer more questions, but we're getting busier with foot traffic right now.
Thank you for your interest!
I'm looking for something like a standard SPST momentary switch, but it measures the applied force.
Something like this: http://www.pololu.com/product/1696
But in a package like this: http://grobotronics.com/images/detailed/1/Tact_Switch__48812_zoom.jpg or surface mount equivalent.
You know the sort of button they put in to a games controller which can measure the force on the button? I opened up a Playstation controller and they used a custom silicone + carbon moulding to achieve it. Was wondering if there are any discrete, off the shelf, push buttons which do the same.
