Deformable In-Hand Slip-Aware Tactile Sensor with Integrated Velocity, Force/Torque, and Pressure Map Sensing

Slip detection is fundamental to dexterous manipulation, yet existing systems often lack precise characterization of detection latency and cross-platform generalization. We present SlipSense, a multimodal tactile slip-detection framework built on TacV5, a compact sensor integrating a $32 \times 32$ piezoresistive array operating at 240 Hz and a 3-axis MEMS accelerometer operating at 8 kHz. The piezoresistive array captures spatial pressure distributions, while the accelerometer captures friction-induced vibrations, providing complementary slip cues. The framework performs modality-specific encoding, intra-sensor fusion, and cross-modal attention with causal temporal prediction at 240 Hz. Experiments on a dataset of 1.4 million frames spanning 37 objects demonstrate the complementarity of the two modalities. SlipSense achieves 96.7% Macro F1 with a false-positive rate below 1.6%, detecting 76% of slip events within 23.1 ms. When trained solely on UMI data, SlipSense generalizes zero-shot to a Tesollo dexterous hand, transferring across unseen objects, distinct sensor units, and robotic platforms without retraining.

We present FlexiTac, a low-cost, open-source, and scalable piezoresistive tactile sensing solution designed for robotic end-effectors. FlexiTac is a practical "plug-in" module consisting of (i) thin, flexible tactile sensor pads that provide dense tactile signals and (ii) a compact multi-channel readout board that streams synchronized measurements for real-time control and large-scale data collection. FlexiTac pads adopt a sealed three-layer laminate stack (FPC-Velostat-FPC) with electrode patterns directly integrated into flexible printed circuits, substantially improving fabrication throughput and repeatability while maintaining mechanical compliance for deployment on both rigid and soft grippers. The readout electronics use widely available, low-cost components and stream tactile signals to a host computer at 100 Hz via serial communication. Across multiple configurations, including fingertip pads and larger tactile mats, FlexiTac can be mounted on diverse platforms without major mechanical redesign. We further show that FlexiTac supports modern tactile learning pipelines, including 3D visuo-tactile fusion for contact-aware decision making, cross-embodiment skill transfer, and real-to-sim-to-real fine-tuning with GPU-parallel tactile simulation. Our project page is available at https://flexitac.github.io/.

Vision-based learning from demonstrations has achieved remarkable success in enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks and high-level semantic reasoning, yet it remains insufficient for complex, contact-rich manipulation. While there is broad agreement that tactile sensing improves manipulation, there is no empirical guidance on which tactile sensors are best suited for which manipulation tasks. In this paper, we provide a systematic, task-driven evaluation of tactile sensors for robot manipulation and propose a framework for selecting and evaluating sensors based on manipulation policy performance. Separate manipulation policies are trained for tactile sensors of four distinct modalities: visual, acoustic, magnetic, and resistive, across three tasks: pick-and-place with unknown mass, object reorientation, and plug insertion. For each task, an analysis of how sensor properties such as spatial resolution, shear sensing, and tactile representation, and the inherent material friction affect task performances is done. Rather than tactile sensing being universally beneficial in the same way, our results show that the usefulness of tactile information depends strongly on sensor modality, material properties, and the specific manipulation tasks. All of the tactile sensors, code, data, and hardware setup will be publicly available on the project website.