Model and processing of whole-body tactile sensor suit for human-robot contact interaction

Abstract

The function that enables a robot to react when touched by a human is indispensable for a robot which enters our daily life. This paper describes the model and processing of full-body humanoid's tactile sensor suit for the human-robot interaction. The tactile sensor suit is first modeled to make a symbolized tactile data structure. Then conversion and compensation process is proposed to enable the robot to obtain accurate tactile data no matter what posture it takes. Then we explain the robot system and two experiments using a 36 DOF full-body humanoid: the first is the acquiring maps to process the tactile data, and second is the conformation to a human's shape as a human-robot contact interaction with proposed sensor suit model and processing.