Development of soft and distributed tactile sensors and the application to a humanoid robot

This paper describes a comprehensive tactile sensor systemwhich can cover wide areas of full-body robots. Based on design criteria which are introduced from requirements, we develop two types of tactile sensor elements. One is a multi-valued touch sensor which has multi-level pressure thresholds. It is capable of coveringwide areas of robot surfaces. The other is made of soft, conductive gel, which has the advantage of compliance comparedwith other sheet-type tactile sensors. With these two types sensors, we develop the tactile sensor system on the full-body robot ‘H4’. Details of the sensor system on the robot and some experiments using tactile information are described.