Johns Hopkins Unveils OpenTac: Auto-Designable Tactile Skins for Any Robot Surface
_krishna_murthy · x · 2026-10-22
A Johns Hopkins team released OpenTac, a tactile sensor + ecosystem that automatically designs, customizes, and deploys tactile skins on any robot surface.
Beyond normal force, OpenTac estimates shear forces tangential to the sensor surface: in the demo video, a finger pressing and twisting on the sensor shows a heatmap of normal force magnitude with arrows denoting shear direction. Multiple local shear vectors can be organized to estimate higher-order quantities such as twists.
Led by Ari Slep with a large group of JHU robotics faculty, this is the author's first preprint since starting their faculty position at JHU CS and founding the SciPhy lab this fall.
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