Soft Tactile Skin Using an Embedded Ionic Liquid and Tomographic Imaging

Whole-body-contact sensing will be crucial in the quest to make robots capable of safe interaction with humans. This paper describes a novel design and a fabrication method of artificial tactile sensing skin for robots. The manufacturing method described in this paper allows easy filling of a complex microchannel network with a liquid conductor (e.g., room temperature ionic liquid (RTIL)). The proposed sensing skin can detect the magnitude and location of surface contacts using electrical impedance tomography (EIT), an imaging technique mostly used in the medical field and examined recently in conjunction with sensors based on a piezoresistive polymer sheet for robotic applications. Unlike piezoresistive polymers, our IL-filled artificial skin changes its impedance in a more predictable manner, since the measured value is determined by a simple function of the microchannel geometry only, rather than complex physical phenomena. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate that our EIT artificial skin can detect surface contacts and graphically show their magnitudes and locations. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4029474]