I'll bet you could open the grippers fully and recalibrate on power up.

I've worked in this space in automation with industrial grade robots and more bespoke end effectors that don't look like mainstream robots, but fulfil specific needs. Responding to some of your questions with how I could see the above touch sensor helping:

Trash sort and recycling: Not many robots here, majority of sorting takes advantage of object material properties. Some companies tried to add delta robots to keep up with the high rates required to even approach profitability, but they weren't good enough. Maybe some municipalities or universities that have lots of funding could justify adding robots, but it's just hard to financially justify.

Recalibration: I'm curious what the developers have for handling reduced magnetic fields over time along with gunk. Silicone is washdown rated, but anything soft at high throughput with parts will start to wear out and change pickup characteristics.

Washing and destemming a tomato is more of a problem to solve now that will need another 10+ years of price reductions in robot+end effector costs and increased efficiency before it beats bulk washing and hand-destemming (or crude machine work). Maybe it'll be a grad-student's project for a theoretical future home-bot

The Lenovo TrackPoint is likely already 95% of what you'd need from a trackpad, but this touch sensor is likely not even focused at that market.

Things I see useful for this robot touch sensor:

* Simpler version that detects part presence, is just a Boolean feedback of "part detected" which can stick on existing end effectors. This is often handled by load calculations of the robot to detect if it has a part, but could also detect if a part has substantially "moved" while it's been gripped, sending a signal to the robot to pause

* Harder to suggest items for food as soft grippers (inflatable fingers) will grip at the precise pressure that they're inflated, reducing the need for sensitive feedback. The application for this touch sensor would be food that needs a combination of different pressures to properly secure something, can't think of a great example

* Hard to also suggest places where this sensor would help with fine alignment, as major manufacturers have motor and arm feedback with WAY more sensitivity than the average person would realize, google Fanuc " Touch Sensing". But, this could help when the end effector is longer and it's harder for the joints to detect position

* Fabric manipulation. Fabric is just a hard problem for robots, adding in more information about the "part" should be helpful. Unlocking more automations for shoe manufacturing at reasonable prices is a big wall

While this is possible, it would create stress concentrations within the elastomer and could significantly affect its durability. We saw this effect even when using larger magnetic particles as with ReSkin, https://reskin.dev. If instead we make the elastomer more rigid, it would worsen grasp stability.

Looks like it's a cured silicon, and you can do whatever the heck you want with it.

https://www.smooth-on.com/products/dragon-skin-10-slow/

So I don't think you could 3d print it, but you could 3d print a mold.

Yes! The sleek form factor leaves a lot of room to integrate other sensors and modalities!

they say "AnySkin uses the same 5-magnetometer circuitry as ReSkin,". and ReSkin uses Melexis MLX90393.

(Interesting fact: in MLX90393, you can customize 2 lower address bits using config pins, and there are multiple part numbers which only differ in higher address bits - so a single bus can have dozens of magnetometers attached. It's a very helpful feature, a lot of magnetometers are designed for compass use only, and thus have no support for address customization at all)

We use the MLX90393

Yes, and importantly we find that visuotactile policies work even when replacing skins. This hasn't been shown before, to the best of our knowledge, and opens the door to a number of exciting large-scale applications of this sensor.

We are just collecting emails on the Google form as contact information to get more details when shipping samples. I am sorry that the form is asking for a google account - we will fix that as soon as possible.