Telemetric Artificial Skin for Soft Robot

Robots of new generation to coexist with human harmoniously will require the sensor skin that is soft to cover the whole body. But it would be very difficult to fabricate such a skin with existing technology, because it is laborious to place and wire vast amount of sensor elements on the 3-dimensionally configured robot surface. In this paper we propose a novel method to fabricate such a sensor skin. The skin contains sensor chips which receive the electrical power and transmit the tactile signal without wires. The skin is configured in an arbitrary shape easily, and it is elastic and tough because each sensing element does not need any fragile wires. The fabrication of the prototype telemetry tactile chip and experimental results of multiple chip signal detection are shown. INTRODUCTION The robot working closely with human will require the sensor skin that is soft to cover the whole body [1] . But it would be very difficult to fabricate such a skin with existing technology[2,3,4], because it’s laborious to place and wire vast amount of sensor elements on the 3-dimensionally configured robot surface. In this paper we propose a novel method to fabricate such a tactile sensor skin based on telemetry. The skin can be configured in an arbitrary shape easily. It is elastic [5], and tough because each sensing element does not need any fragile long wires to transmit the sensing signal. The principle and the experimental results are shown. TELEMETRY CHIP FOR ARTIFICIAL SKIN The goal of the research is to establish a method to fabricate a sensor skin through the following process. ( See. Fig. 1) <1> Preparation of molding material containing sensor chips which receive the electrical power and transmit the tactile signal without wires, and <2> learning the sensor chip position after molding. In this paper, we design the sensor chip to realize such a process. Fig. 2 shows the structure of the sensor chip. Each chip is composed of three parts, a coil for both sensing and signal transmission, an electrical circuit and a power receiving coil. The operation of simple structure is as follows.