An integrated tactile feedback system for multifingered robot hands

Abstract

Presents an integrated tactile feedback system for a multifingered robot hand to enable a human operator to feel contacts/interactions between the robot finger and the environment remotely. The system presented consists of a finger-shaped tactile sensor measuring contact areas on the fingertip and a tactile display rendering the contact information to the human operator. The tactile sensor, designed on the total internal reflection principle, can capture high resolution and high quality tactile images on the fingertip. The tactile display with 24 pins spaced at 2.5 mm uses DC solenoids structured in multi-layers to render the contacts between the fingertip and the environment. We have integrated the tactile sensor and the tactile display into a five-fingered robot hand system and verified the performance of the integrated system by experiments.