1. Augmenting curved robot surfaces with soft tactile skin
- Author
-
Robert Haschke, Martin Meier, Gereon Buscher, Guillaume Walck, and Helge Ritter
- Subjects
Engineering ,business.industry ,Thin layer ,Stiffness ,Piezoresistive effect ,Padding ,Surface pattern ,chemistry.chemical_compound ,Silicone ,chemistry ,Electronic engineering ,medicine ,Glabrous skin ,Robot ,medicine.symptom ,business ,Biomedical engineering - Abstract
We present a novel, soft, tactile skin composed of a fabric-based, stretchable sensor technology based on the piezoresistive effect. Softness is achieved by a combination of a soft silicone padding covered by a skin of more durable, tearproof silicone with an imprinted surface pattern mimicking human glabrous skin, found e.g. in fingertips. Its very thin layer structure (starting from 2.5 mm) facilitates integration on existing robot surfaces, particularly on small and highly curved links. For example, we augmented our Shadow Dexterous Hand with 12 palm sensors, and 2 resp. 3 sensors in the middle resp. proximal phalanges of each finger. To demonstrate the usefulness and efficiency of the proposed sensor skin, we performed a challenging classification task distinguishing squeezed objects based on their varying stiffness.
- Published
- 2015
- Full Text
- View/download PDF