GenTact Toolbox: Procedurally Generated Tactile Skin for Robots

Website | Getting Started | Making Your First Skin | Tips and Tricks | More Modalities

---

Procedural skins are a new class of artificial skins for robotic applications designed to be form-fitting and highly customizable to individual robots and use-cases. Procedural skins utilize a CAD model of a robot to automatically generate sensors with directely tunable parameters such as sensing resolution and sensing coverage.

Making your first skin

Installation

Intallation via ZIP (Recommended)

Download the latest release here. Once installed, import the extension in Blender via Edit > Preferences > Get Extensions > Install from Disk...

Installation from source (For Development)

./install.sh #Linux and Mac
# Windows not tested yet

This script will automatically find your Blender version, then generate a built copy of the extension under build. The zip file in build containing the extension can be installed in Blender via Edit > Preferences > Get Extensions > Install from Disk...

Building the extension

This command will generate primitives.blend from the source code found under src. This blend file is compiled this way for safer version control of the most important layers. Before instlaling the extension, run the following command

cd GenTact_merge_update/src
blender --background --python build.py

Installing the Extension

This repo is compatible with Blender 5.1 and will not work with earlier releases. Use the follow commands to build the extension as a zip file that can be imported.

cd procedural_skins_addon
blender --command extension build

Import the zip file via Edit > Preferences > Get Extensions > Install from Disk...

Alternative Installation

Each node is provided as an Asset and can be accessed through the Asset Browser in Blender. To add the nodes to the Asset Browser, include the path to the procedural_skins_addon through the following steps in Blender:

1. Navigate to Edit > Preferences
2. Add procedural_skins_addon ot the Asset Libraries file paths

Getting Started

No prerequisite experience with Blender is needed to get started and design your first skin unit. All you need is a CAD model that you plan to cover with skin, then drag and drop the desired components onto the model from the asset browser.

Creating a Custom Procedural Algorithm

The procedural design is built on Blender's geometry node system. You can edit the designs by opening a geometry nodes window and navigating through the premade tabs.

Isaac Sim Contact Extension:

---

Detailed instructions on how to import your skin unit to Isaac Sim can be found in the Contact Extension README

Liscence

This repository is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, which allows for unrestricted sharing and modifications with attribution, but prohibits commercial use.

Citation

If you find our paper or codebase helpful, please consider citing:

@inproceedings{kohlbrenner2026design,
  title={Design, Mapping, and Contact Anticipation with 3D-printed Whole-Body Tactile and Proximity Sensors},
  author={Kohlbrenner, Carson and Soukhovei, Anna and Escobedo, Caleb and Nechyporenko, Nataliya and Roncone, Alessandro},
  booktitle={2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year={2026}
}

@inproceedings{kohlbrenner2025gentact,
  title={GenTact Toolbox: A Computational Design Pipeline to Procedurally Generate Context-Driven 3D Printed Whole-Body Artificial Skins},
  author={Kohlbrenner, Carson and Escobedo, Caleb and Bae, S Sandra and Dickhans, Alexander and Roncone, Alessandro},
  booktitle={2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year={2025}
}