OpenTac: An Open Ecosystem for Customizable, Scalable, and Transferable 3D Tactile Sensing

OpenTac combines a scalable resistive tactile skin with CAD, simulation, and data-acquisition tools for robot applications. Its structured deformable overlay encodes normal force and local shear from taxel responses. The authors report fabricating more than 30 sensor designs and demonstrate tactile feedback control and manipulation-policy learning on four real-world robot embodiments. Adaptive readout reaches kilohertz rates and is 19.2× faster than full-array raster scanning at 16 sampled taxels per update on a 1024-taxel skin.