Vision sees the skin.PolySkin feels through it.

A camera reads color and shape. It cannot tell that a fruit is a day from over-ripe, or that it is slipping before it falls. PolySkin is a multi-modal tactile sensor that gives robots a biomimetic sense of touch — reading pressure, slip, texture, and internal imaging in real time, embedded across every contact surface. Calibrated per crop and material, it captures the contact information optical sensors alone cannot resolve.

Fig. 01 · Contact Readout, Cross-Section

Four modalities sensed at a single contact — normal force, lateral slip, surface texture, and internal imaging — fused into one real-time stream.

What It Senses · One Skin, Four Channels

PRESSURE

Fn · normal force

Distributed normal-force sensing across the contact patch — enough to lift, gentle enough to leave no mark.

SLIP

Δ · lateral

Detects micro-slip at the contact before an object is dropped, closing the grip loop in real time.

TEXTURE

Rt · surface

Resolves surface micro-texture to help separate produce class and flag surface defects.

IMAGING

internal · sub-surface

Internal imaging looks beneath the skin at the contact, surfacing ripeness and sub-surface defects that external sensors miss.

sensing modalities

pressure · slip · texture · imaging

sensing skin

embedded on every contact surface

Real‑time

contact data

at production line speed

How It Works

i.Soft multi-modal skin

A compliant sensing layer transduces normal force, shear/slip, and surface texture at the contact patch, with internal imaging for sub-surface ripeness and defect cues.

ii.Per-crop calibration

Each skin is calibrated to the target crop and material so readings map to physically meaningful units rather than raw signal.

iii.Real-time fusion

Modalities are fused on-board and streamed to the gripper controller, closing the grip loop fast enough for moving lines.