MagPie Tactile Skin

A modular magnetic and piezoresistive skin developed with Breck School students; an IROS 2026 workshop spotlight.

Two sensing signals in one module

MagPie combines piezoresistive and Hall-effect sensing in a compliant triangular taxel. Its modular housing is designed to let multiple taxels form a larger tactile surface. The workshop paper reports the electronic architecture, force-response measurements, and an eight-taxel latency study.

I developed this project with Jackson Goodrich and Eytan Krebs, high school students at Breck School, and Karthik Desingh. Jackson and Eytan contributed equally to the paper. It was accepted for an oral presentation at the IROS 2026 Scalable Tactile Sensing for Dexterous Manipulation workshop.

The official workshop program lists MagPie as a contributed spotlight on September 27, 2026.

Read the accepted workshop submission.

This is a sensor research prototype. The workshop result does not establish full-body robot deployment or general-purpose tactile manipulation.

Prototype and measurements

Photograph of an assembled triangular MagPie tactile taxel with its four-wire bus
Assembled MagPie taxel from the IROS 2026 workshop poster. This is a sensor prototype, not a robot-wide deployed skin.
Measured raw ADC counts versus applied force for the piezoresistive and Hall-effect channels
One taxel under two load–unload cycles. The piezoresistive channel approaches its ADC ceiling earlier; the Hall-effect channel responds over a wider tested force range. These are raw counts, not a calibrated force estimate.
Measured response latencies across eight MagPie taxels
Poster latency measurements from ten trials on each of eight taxels. The tested bus showed roughly 5–12 ms command-to-response latency without a clear position-dependent increase; this does not establish larger-network performance.

Sensor design views

CAD rendering of modular MagPie skin on a robot arm
Manuscript CAD illustration of modular MagPie taxels on a robot arm; it is a design visualization, not a deployed skin.
Exploded CAD view of a triangular MagPie taxel
Exploded CAD view of the 44 mm triangular taxel, showing the layered piezoresistive and magnetic-sensing design.