Contact Behavior of Soft Spherical Tactile Sensors

In this paper, we studied a compliant tactile sensor with a spherical shell geometry. This bioinspired sensor has been successfully tested in actual robots whose behaviors are guided by tactile feedback. A model of the sensor was developed to study the contact response of the sensor to objects with different geometries. The sensor response is the estimation of both, normal and shear forces (3-D vector). The model was validated using experimental data and used to predict the behavior of sensors with different radii. This information allows us to design sensors with different sizes according to the requirements of a given robotic application.