Haptic Intelligence Miscellaneous 2019

A Fabric-based Scalable Robotic Skin Mimicking Biological Tactile Hyperacuity

Implementing a whole-body tactile sensor is becoming a critical topic in robotics since physical contacts can occur at any location of the robot. Fabricating such a large-scale system typically requires complex electrical wiring to achieve high spatial resolution. Interestingly, biological skins have tactile hyperacuity, which is enabled by overlapping the receptive fields. This study introduces a fabric-based tactile sensor inspired by this biological feature. The tactile sensor injects electrical current into a pair of electrodes and measures the corresponding electrical potentials formed around the current pathway, which can be considered as a receptive field. When two or more neighboring pairs of electrodes are sampled, sensitive regions overlap in a way similar to the biological system. For the experiments, a fabric-based tactile sensor with only 24 electrodes in an area of 200 mm × 200 mm is developed. The sensor can localize point contact with an error of 8.13 mm, while the sensor’s minimum two-point discrimination distance is nearly 35 mm. This performance is comparable to that of the stomach region of human skin. This sensing approach could greatly simplify whole-body tactile skin development in the future.

Author(s): Hyosang Lee and Kyungseo Park and Jung Kim and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker
Year: 2019
Month: November
Bibtex Type: Miscellaneous (misc)
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive
How Published: Workshop paper (3 pages) presented at the IROS RoboTac Workshop on New Advances in Tactile Sensation, Perception, and Learning in Robotics: Emerging Materials and Technologies for Manipulation
Note: Co-Winner of the Award for Best Poster
State: Published

BibTex

@misc{Lee19-IROSW-Hyperacuity,
  title = {A Fabric-based Scalable Robotic Skin Mimicking Biological Tactile Hyperacuity},
  abstract = {Implementing a whole-body tactile sensor is becoming a critical topic in robotics since physical contacts can occur at any location of the robot. Fabricating such a large-scale system typically requires complex electrical wiring to achieve high spatial resolution. Interestingly, biological skins have tactile hyperacuity, which is enabled by overlapping the receptive fields. This study introduces a fabric-based tactile sensor inspired by this biological feature. The tactile sensor injects electrical current into a pair of electrodes and measures the corresponding electrical potentials formed around the current pathway, which can be considered as a receptive field. When two or more neighboring pairs of electrodes are sampled, sensitive regions overlap in a way similar to the biological system. For the experiments, a fabric-based tactile sensor with only 24 electrodes in an area of 200 mm × 200 mm is developed. The sensor can localize point contact with an error of 8.13 mm, while the sensor’s minimum two-point discrimination distance is nearly 35 mm. This performance is comparable to that of the stomach region of human skin. This sensing approach could greatly simplify whole-body tactile skin development in the future.},
  howpublished = {Workshop paper (3 pages) presented at the IROS RoboTac Workshop on New Advances in Tactile Sensation, Perception, and Learning in Robotics: Emerging Materials and Technologies for Manipulation},
  month = nov,
  year = {2019},
  note = {Co-Winner of the Award for Best Poster},
  slug = {lee19-irosw-hyperacuity},
  author = {Lee, Hyosang and Park, Kyungseo and Kim, Jung and Kuchenbecker, Katherine J.},
  month_numeric = {11}
}