A tactile sensor system for a three-fingered robot manipulator

Tactile sensor systems are an essential prerequisite for the implementation of complex manipulation and exploration tasks using robots. Tactile exploration has not yet found its way into many laboratories, because most tactile sensors are technically demanding and expensive. The desire to perform real-time control and pattern recognition with tactile sensors led us to the design of a cost-effective artificial fingertip. At our laboratory two distinct types of sensors are in use: force/position sensors, and slippage detectors. We report on first experimental results with a fingertip prototype performing rolling and sliding movements over a flat surface. To facilitate experimentation with tactile sensors, we designed and developed a data acquisition and transportation system that fulfils our demands on bandwidth, flexibility, and cost. This system consists of two hardware components, a configurable multi-channel analog signal sampler (MASS) to acquire sensor data, and an intelligent dual-ported random-access buffer (BRAD) to avoid data transportation bottlenecks.