A tactile sensing system for dexterous manipulation

One factor that limits the range of tasks that robots can perform robustly is the scarcity of useful sensors available to provide feedback to the robot control system. While much progress has been made with vision sensors and force/torque sensors, tactile sensing systems have fallen behind, and so general-purpose tactile sensing systems are not commercially available. The aim of this work is therefore to produce a tactile sensing system that could be manufactured inexpensively, could be used on a wide variety of robotic systems, and would provide the kind of output typically required in dexterous manipulation applications. Such a tactile sensing system will be presented in this paper. The tactile transducers used in this system are based on semiconductive ink technology that allows transducers of any size, shape, and resistance range to be produced merely by altering the ink printing process and substrate geometry. Each sensor outputs three pieces of information that are useful in robotic manipulation-two parameters indicating the location of a contact point on the transducer and one parameter specifying the amount of force being exerted at the contact point. So that the sensing system could support transducers of different shapes and sizes, the analog interface circuitry of this system has been designed to be fully programmable, and also includes circuitry to enable self-calibration with appropriate software.<>