A full-body tactile sensor suit using electrically conductive fabric and strings

Inaba, Masayuki; Hoshino, Yukiko; Nagasaka, Ken; Ninomiya, T.; Kagami, Satoshi; Inoue, H.

doi:10.1109/iros.1996.570816

Cited by 115 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Iwata et al [4] demonstrated physical interaction with users via a skin equipped with 6-axis-kinesthetic sensors. Pan et al [11] and Inaba et al [2] described tactile sensors using electrically conductive fabric and strings as a wholebody distributed tactile sensor for humanoid robots. And Shinoda et al [12] proposed a wireless system for transmitting tactile information by burying wireless sensors under the robot "skin."…”

Section: Background and Comparisonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Super-Flexible Skin Sensors Embedded on the Whole Body, Self-Organizing Based on Haptic Interactions

Noda¹,

Miyashita²,

Ishiguro³

et al. 2008

Robotics: Science and Systems IV

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Abstract-As robots become more ubiquitous in our daily lives, humans and robots are working in ever-closer physical proximity to each other. These close physical distances change the nature of human robot interaction considerably. First, it becomes more important to consider safety, in case robots accidentally touch (or hit) the humans. Second, touch (or haptic) feedback from humans can be a useful additional channel for communication, and is a particularly natural one for humans to utilize. Covering the whole robot body with malleable tactile sensors can help to address the safety issues while providing a new communication interface. First, soft, compliant surfaces are less dangerous in the event of accidental human contact. Second, flexible sensors are capable of distinguishing many different types of touch (e.g., hard v.s. gentle stroking). Since soft skin on a robot tends to invite humans to engage in even more touch interactions, it is doubly important that the robot can process haptic feedback from humans. In this paper, we discuss attempts to solve some of the difficult new technical and information processing challenges presented by flexible touch sensitive skin. Our approach is based on a method for sensors to self-organize into sensor banks for classification of touch interactions. This is useful for distributed processing and helps to reduce the maintenance problems of manually configuring large numbers of sensors. We found that using sparse sensor banks containing as little as 15% of the full sensor set it is possible to classify interaction scenarios with accuracy up to 80% in a 15-way forced choice task. Visualization of the learned subspaces shows that, for many categories of touch interactions, the learned sensor banks are composed mainly of physically local sensor groups. These results are promising and suggest that our proposed method can be effectively used for automatic analysis of touch behaviors in more complex tasks.

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Section: Background and Comparisonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Robots are becoming more ubiquitous in our daily lives [1] [2][3] [4], and humans and robots are working in ever-closer physical proximity to each other. Due to this proximity, there is increased potential for robots to inadvertently harm users.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Super-Flexible Skin Sensors Embedded on the Whole Body, Self-Organizing Based on Haptic Interactions

Noda¹,

Miyashita²,

Ishiguro³

et al. 2008

Robotics: Science and Systems IV

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“…Dozens of tactile arrays have been designed [1], [2], using nearly every conceivable transduction technology including resistance [3], capacitance [4], [5], magnetism [6], optical imaging [7] and much more. Despite this, tactile sensors still do not see widespread use in most robots and it often requires considerable work to customize sensors to specific robots.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexible, stretchable tactile arrays from MEMS barometers

Jentoft

Tenzer

Vogt

et al. 2013

2013 16th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR)

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Abstract-Many applications for tactile sensors require a flexible, stretchable array to allow installation on curved surfaces or to measure forces on deformable objects. This paper presents a sensor array created with barometers and flexible printed circuit boards that delivers high sensitivity on a flexible, stretchable package using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components: MEMS barometers and commercially-compatible flexible printed circuit boards. The array is demonstrated on the surface of a jamming gripper, where it provides the ability to sense grasping events and detect object shape.

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“…Small sensor modules are typically necessary in order to allow the communication between them; size constraints are then very critical as not enough space typically can be found on the sensor modules to the local integration of microcontrollers or other networking electronics. One of the first examples of full-body skin for robots was proposed by Inaba et al [3] that describes a tactile sensor system composed of a layered structure of electrically conductive fabric implementing a matrix of pressure sensitive switches. However, the complexity of the manufacturing process and the limited sensing capabilities represent the most significant limits of this approach.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%