Development of Robots with Soft Sensor Flesh for Achieving Close Interaction Behavior

Abstract

In order to achieve robots' working around humans, safe contacts against objects, humans, and environments with broad area of their body should be allowed. Furthermore, it is desirable to actively use those contacts for achieving tasks. Considering that, many practical applications will be realized by whole-body close interaction of many contacts with others. Therefore, robots are strongly expected to achieve whole-body interaction behavior with objects around them. Recently, it becomes possible to construct whole-body tactile sensor network by the advancement of research for tactile sensing system. Using such tactile sensors, some research groups have developed robots with whole-body tactile sensing exterior. However, their basic strategy is making a distributed 1-axis tactile sensor network covered with soft thin material. Those are not sufficient for achieving close interaction and detecting complicated contact changes. Therefore, we propose “Soft Sensor Flesh.” Basic idea of “Soft Sensor Flesh” is constructing robots' exterior with soft and thick foam with many sensor elements including multiaxis tactile sensors. In this paper, a constructing method for the robot systems with such soft sensor flesh is argued. Also, we develop some prototypes of soft sensor flesh and verify the feasibility of the proposed idea by actual behavior experiments.

Covering a Robot Fingertip With uSkin: A Soft Electronic Skin With Distributed 3-Axis Force Sensitive Elements for Robot Hands

“…However, those sensors can only provide one axis of force per load cell. Tri-axial sensors based on strain gauges were integrated into the soft skin of the robot Macra [14]. Because of the sensor size, using them for distributed sensing in robot hands may not be feasible.…”

Design and Characterization of a Three-Axis Hall Effect-Based Soft Skin Sensor

“…A small-sized optical sensor that can measure both normal and shear forces was already proposed more than 10 years ago in [ 6 ], but to the best of the authors’ knowledge it has not been integrated in a robotic system yet. Optical 3-axis sensors have also been integrated into soft sensor flesh [ 7 ], and those sensors have recently been made commercially available by Touchence as well. A smaller (10 mm wide and 8 mm high) but stiffer optical sensor that can measure the force vector is currently available from OptoForce [ 8 ].…”

Electrical Impedance Tomography for Artificial Sensitive Robotic Skin: A Review

“…A number of different technologies have been used in endeavours to create better tactile sensors and sensitive skins. A wide variety of sensing techniques has stemmed from exploration of different transduction effects and materials, ranging from the use of large-scale arrays of discrete sensors based on organic FETs [12] or piezoresistive semiconductors [13]- [15] to sensors that use capacitive [16], [17], magnetic [18], 0000-0000/00$00.00 c 2012 IEEE [19], piezoelectric [20]- [25], optical [26]- [29] and other principles [30]- [32]. Often, multiple layers of different sensor types [9] are used in an attempt to imitate the sensing capabilities of human skin [33].…”