Amazon and University of Michigan give robots a sense of touch

Amazon Science · 6 days ago

Amazon and University of Michigan researchers developed HydroShear, a simulation method that accurately models tactile forces on robot fingers by tracking how contact forces accumulate over time during object manipulation. Policies trained entirely in simulation using HydroShear transferred to real robots with a 93 percent success rate across four manipulation tasks, compared to 34 percent and 58-61 percent for existing methods. This approach enables robots to learn complex contact-rich manipulation skills like peg insertion and bin packing without requiring extensive real-world training data.