We present the design and realization of a conformable tactile sensor skin(patent pending). The skin is organized as a network of self-contained modules consisting of tiny pressure-sensitive elements which communicate through a serial bus. By adding or removing modules it is possible to adjust the area covered by the skin as well as the number (and density) of tactile elements. The skin is therefore highly modular and thus intrinsically scalable. Moreover, because the substrate on which the modules are mounted is sufficiently pliable to be folded and stiff enough to be cut, it is possible to freely distribute the individual tactile elements. A tactile skin composed of multiple modules can also be installed on curved surfaces. Due to their easy configurability we call our sensors "cut-and-paste tactile sensors." We describe a prototype implementation of the skin on a humanoid robot.

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CPG (central pattem generator) and entrainment dynamics together form a promising framework for robust and adaptive behavior generation for a high degree of freedom system in unstructured environment. This paper investigates its possibility in the domain of biped robotic locomotion. We extend a previous work on 2 0 biped locomotion using neural oscillators t o 30, antroducing many more degrees of freedom and complexity in control. While the complexity of the problem has been increased, we have simplified the internal neural mechanism compared to the original 2 0 work. Our fully dynamic 3 0 samulation experiments showed that our mechanism can generate 3D stable biped stepping motion as well as tolerance against external perturbations.0-7803-4465-0/98 $10.00 0 1998 IEEE a4

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