Barometer-based Tactile Skin for Anthropomorphic Robot Hand

We present our second generation tactile sensor for the Shadow Dexterous Hand's palm. We were able to significantly improve the tactile sensor characteristics by utilizing our latest barometer-based tactile sensing technology with linear (R² ≥ 0.9996) sensor output and no noticeable hysteresis. The sensitivity threshold of the tactile cells and the spatial density were both dramatically increased. We demonstrate the benefits of the new sensor by re-running an experiment to estimate the stiffness of different objects that we originally used to test our first generation palm sensor. The results underline a considerable performance boost in estimation accuracy, just due to the improved tactile skin. We also propose a revised neural network architecture that even further improves the average classification accuracy to 96% in a 5-fold cross-validation.