In this paper, we propose a design method of wholebody tactile interface for elevating human-robot coordination. The proposed surface cover sensor as the tactile interface enables robots to detect accurate 3-D force vector applied on various parts of the body during physical interaction with

When making contact with an object, a robot can use a tactile sensor consisting of a heating element and a temperature sensor to recognize the object’s material based on conductive heat transfer from the tactile sensor to the object. When this type of tactile sensor has time to fully reheat prior to contact and the duration of contact is long enough to achieve a thermal steady state, numerous m...

This paper shows how contact curvature can be determined from a single contact with a cylindrical tactile sensor. When the tactile finger touches an unknown smooth convex surface, contact location, principal curvatures, and normal force are determined from a 4 x 4 window of strain measurements. In principle, contact properties can be determined by a linear inverse-filter process, but this appro...

Spiders can sense sounds in a frequency range between approximately 40 and 600 Hz by the use of hairs; they can detect e.g. the puff of wind of buzzing flies. On the contrary, scorpions use hairs as tactile sensors for obstacle avoidance. To integrate the advantages of both types of sensoric hairs, this article presents an artificial auditory-tactile sensor system, which combines the principles...

In this study, we describe the design of a tactile sensor based on polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF). The sensor exhibits high force sensitivity and linearity. This sensor is integrated with an endoscopic grasper tool and can be used in minimally invasive surgeries. It consists of three distinct layers. A rigid micro-machined tooth-like silicon constitutes the top layer of the grasper, and the Ple...

This paper reports on a prototype tactile sensing system with only three sensing elements. The magnitude and position of the applied force is obtained by utilising triangulation approach combined with membrane stress. Some information about the shape of the contacted Ž . object is obtained. The polyvinylidene fluoride PVDF sensor is designed to overcome the problems of cross talk between sensin...

We classify surface textures using a polymer-based microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) tactile sensor array and a robust statistical approach. We demonstrate that a MEMS tactile sensor resembling a flexible sensor ‘skin’ built using a polyimide substrate can successfully classify textures. Texture classification is achieved by using a maximum likelihood decision rule that optimally classifies...

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...

This paper investigates the design optimisation of a magnetic field based soft tactile sensor, comprised of a magnet and Hall effect module separated by an elastomer. The aim was to minimise sensitivity of the output force with respect to the input magnetic field; this was achieved by varying the geometry and material properties. Finite element simulations determined the magnetic field and stru...

To build an adaptive autonomous robot, it must have a certain number of external sensors to observe the environment. One physical phenomenon is observed as sensor signal flows through these sensors. In this paper, we focus on a “slip” phenomenon and try to build up a network representation of slip of an anthropomorphic robot hand. A robot hand with distributed tactile sensors and a vision senso...