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    "story_id": "mp-2026-10-23-003",
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    "headline": "A Robot Skin Can Be Drawn to Fit the Body",
    "slug": "a-robot-skin-can-be-drawn-to-fit-the-body",
    "dek": "OpenTac turns outlines, developable surfaces or text descriptions into fabrication files for tactile skins that resolve normal and shear forces.",
    "summary": "OpenTac turns outlines, developable surfaces or text descriptions into fabrication files for tactile skins that resolve normal and shear forces.",
    "body_text": "OpenTac combines a resistive sensing layer with a structured deformable overlay. Neighboring taxels respond differently to tangential loading, allowing local shear vectors to be decoded while their common response carries normal force. A CAD tool generates sensor designs for 2D outlines and developable 3D surfaces, and the team fabricated more than 30 shapes. Across four robot embodiments, the system supported contact control and policy learning; adaptive partial readout reached kilohertz rates and was 19.2 times faster than full scanning at 16 sampled taxels on a 1,024-taxel skin. These are prototype demonstrations under the reported calibration and hardware.",
    "why_it_matters": "OpenTac turns outlines, developable surfaces or text descriptions into fabrication files for tactile skins that resolve normal and shear forces.",
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    "importance": 9,
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    "tags": [
      "robotics",
      "tactile sensing",
      "open hardware"
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      "source_id": "source-2026-10-23-003",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2610.31661, original v1",
      "publisher": "arXiv",
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      "published_at": "2026-10-22T13:59:06.000-04:00",
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  "cite_this_report": {
    "title": "A Robot Skin Can Be Drawn to Fit the Body",
    "publisher": "The Machine Press",
    "published_at": "2026-10-23T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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