Design of a Tactile Sensor for Robot Hands

Abstract

The use of skin like tactile sensors will play an important role for the development of humanoid robots performing complex interaction tasks possibly involving humans. In the first part of this chapter we have presented a survey of relevant recent achievements in the area of robot-skin technologies and tactile sensors for robot hand. In the second part an integrated tactile/force sensor with embedded electronics has been presented. The sensor consists of a three components commercial force sensor and of a custom matrix tactile transducer based on pressure sensitive conductive rubber. The sensor is driven by a local embedded microcontroller which implements local algorithms for the processing of raw tactile data extracting relevant parameters related to the contact force distributions.