Frontend and backend electronics achieving flexibility and scalability for tomographic tactile sensing

Tactile sensing is essential for robots to adequately interact with the physical world, but creating tactile sensors for the robot’s soft and flexible body surface has been a challenge. The resistance tomography-based tactile sensors have been introduced as a promising approach to creating soft tactile skins because the sensor fabrication can be greatly simplified with the aid of a computation model. This article introduces an electronic design strategy dividing frontend and backend electronics for the resistance tomography-based tactile sensors. In this scheme, the frontend is made of the piezoresistive structure and electrodes that can be changed depending on the required geometry. The backend is the electronic circuit for resistance tomography, which can be used for various frontend geometries. To evaluate the use of a unified backend for different frontend geometries, two frontend specimens with a square shape and a circular shape are tested. The minimum detectable contact force and the minimum discernible contact distance are calculated as \(0.83 \times 10^{-4}\) N/mm\(^2\), 2.51 mm for the square-shaped frontend and \(1.19 \times 10^{-4}\) N/mm\(^2\), 3.42 mm for the circular-shaped frontend. The results indicated that the proposed electronic design strategy can be used to create tactile skins with different scales and geometries while keeping the same backend design.