A middleware for whole body skin-like tactile systems

Abstract

In this article a software architecture for acquiring, processing and presenting distributed tactile information in realtime is discussed. When humanoid robots are endowed with largescale tactile systems, the need arises to design a framework able to abstract from the underlying robot hardware structure. The article describes relevant functional requirements, architectural choices and specific technical solutions. Experiments show results with respect to a realistic use case, i.e., a humanoid robot fully covered with artificial skin.

Electronic Skin: Achievements, Issues and Trends

“…Moreover, taking into account the human/e-skin or environment/e-skin interaction tasks involving tactile feedback, real-time performance is particularly important [16]. In the event of a failure, one needs to be able to recover the system to its operational state in the least amount of time and impact to the operational applications.…”

Biomimetic artificial skin for robots: A review

“…Here, a skin-like flexible system houses an integrated computing unit and an interface for data transmission (I2C). (Youssefi et al, 2011) shows a whole-body robot skin's performance, as well as the middleware, assisting the tactile structure concurrently (Baglini et al, 2010) presents a comprehensive analysis that gives a thorough examination of a networking system that utilizes 100 Mbit real-time Ethernet protocol enhancements.…”

Contact Modelling and Tactile Data Processing for Robot Skins

“…A video showing online contact shape reconstruction is available as Supplementary Material to this paper and it is available at this link . The current implementation is based on C++ and is built on top of the Skinware framework [ 6 , 42 , 43 ]. In particular, we highlight the following features: both Boussinesq–Cerruti’s and Love’s formulations have been implemented; the algorithms for tractions reconstruction and surface deflections have been designed considering a clear division of the offline and online parts; the implemented algorithms allow for the reconstruction of forces using displacements, pressures using displacements, displacements using forces, and displacements using pressures; for the inverse problem, variants of the algorithms exist, which enforce the non-negativity constraints on tractions.…”

“…The approach presented in this paper has been developed as an open source software. The current implementation is based on C++ and is built on top of the Skinware framework [39,5,40]. In particular, we highlight the following features:…”