Facebook battles the challenges of tactile sensing

Learn more about what comes next. Facebook this morning announced ReSkin, an open source touch-sensing synthetic "skin" created by researchers at the company in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University. Leveraging machine learning and magnetic sensing, ReSkin is designed to offer an inexpensive, versatile, durable, and replaceable solution for long-term use, employing an unsupervised learning algorithm to help auto-calibrate the sensor. Alongside ReSkin, and perhaps timed in effort to distract from exposes detailing its internal turbulence, Facebook also today outlined its broader progress in developing hardware, simulators, libraries, benchmarks, and datasets for touch sensing, which the company says form the foundation for AI systems that can understand and interact through touch. "We typically think of touch as a way to convey warmth and care, but it's also a key sensing modality for perceiving the world around us," Facebook research scientist Roberto Calandra and hardware engineer Mike Lambeta said in a blog post.