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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.
@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} }