In some important robotic human daily life support applications, such as housework or nursing care, soft sensor exterior is needed for allowing close contacts against humans or environments. Although there are many studies on tactile sensing elements themselves and some of them realize the mechanical softness of the element, most of their studies just propose their detection theory with their sensor element prototypes and it is difficult to use them for developing soft tactile exterior. Therefore a soft sensor exterior embedded with multi-axis deformation sensor is developed in this paper. The most important feature for this sensor is that it can detect multi-axis deformation, and the sensor element itself has enough softness to deform with the outer exterior. The developed sensor is constructed by molding a soft urethane foam with infrared LEDs and corresponding phototransistors. It detects 3D deformation of the sensor as voltage changes at each phototransistors. Furthermore, a prototype of soft sensor exterior embedded with the developed sensing elements is realized and we confirmed that the 3D deformation, such as stroking, pinching, and pushing, can be detected using the developed sensor exterior prototype.

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In order to achieve robots' working around humans, safe contacts against objects, humans, and environments with broad area of their body should be allowed. Furthermore, it is desirable to actively use those contacts for achieving tasks. Considering that, many practical applications will be realized by whole-body close interaction of many contacts with others. Therefore, robots are strongly expected to achieve whole-body interaction behavior with objects around them. Recently, it becomes possible to construct whole-body tactile sensor network by the advancement of research for tactile sensing system. Using such tactile sensors, some research groups have developed robots with whole-body tactile sensing exterior. However, their basic strategy is making a distributed 1-axis tactile sensor network covered with soft thin material. Those are not sufficient for achieving close interaction and detecting complicated contact changes. Therefore, we propose “Soft Sensor Flesh.” Basic idea of “Soft Sensor Flesh” is constructing robots' exterior with soft and thick foam with many sensor elements including multiaxis tactile sensors. In this paper, a constructing method for the robot systems with such soft sensor flesh is argued. Also, we develop some prototypes of soft sensor flesh and verify the feasibility of the proposed idea by actual behavior experiments.

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This paper describes developluent of a humanoid robot with soft thi(： k exterior and automatic re − coverable mechanical overload protection rIlech跚 ism． Such featuI ・ es ellable humanoid robots to toIera ． te obstacles in daily cllv 三 ronmellt ． The developed robot ha． s thick soft polyurethane covers elnbedded with tactile sensors a． nd IIlechaIlical torqlle hmiters so that it tolerate impulsive and StatiC overload ． We coIl 一 丘rIlled that the developed robot can wa ． lk ， carry things wea ． 1 ' illg whole − body enclosing exterior ， and it call tolerate the strong colltact such a． s fa 玉 lillg dowll b ｝ ・ dislocating the jo 三 nt aIld recovering autonlatically af七erwards 、 Key Words' Thick soft sells(，r flesh of robot ， Overload protection， Humanoid robot