Telemetric robot skin

Abstract

Telemetric skinHuman-friendly robots of new generation will require the sensor skin that is soft and covering the whole body. But it would be very difficult to fabricate it with the traditional technology, because placement and wiring of vast amount of sensor elements on the 3-dimensionally configured robot surface is laborious. In this paper we propose a novel method to fabricate such a sensor skin. The skin contains sensor chips which receive the electrical power and transmit the tactile signal without wires. The skin is configured in an arbitrary shape easily, and it is elastic and tough because each sensing element does not need any fragile wires. The principle and the experimental results are described.

Towards a minimal architecture for a printable, modular, and robust sensing skin

“…Still others do away entirely with conventional wires to use optical [7], radio frequency [8], or ad-hoc communication methods [9]. Also considered are Tapped Delay Lines (TDLs), which use passive time delay components to time sequence sensor output on a single analog line, and standard addressable bus communication networks such as I 2 C. Finally, recent work [10] in modular sensing units uses a Cellular Finite State Automata (CFSA) model of computation and data transmission in a redundantly wired surface area network.…”

Passive wireless sensing element for sensitive skin

“…(6) At a low frequency, Eq. (5) tells us that the observed voltage is proportional to the square of the chip-turn n when R < R'.…”

“…If we can place small sensing elements in an elastic body without wiring, the skin will be tough and elastic as well as easy to fabricate in a free shape. Based on this consideration, we recently proposed a method called "telemetric skin" [6], and showed a sensing chip receiving electrical power and transmitting tactile signal by inductive coupling. In that research, the signal was produced by an integrated circuit on the sensing chip.…”

Haptic Communication Between Humans and Robots

“…There has been much research on developing tactile sensors that cover the entire body of a robot [2,3,4,5,6]. Pan et al [2] and Inaba et al [4] proposed tactile sensor suits made of electrically conductive fabric.…”

“…Hakozaki et al [5] proposed telemetric robot skin based on sensor chips that consist of an LC resonance circuit. In particular, Inaba et al developed a full-body sensor suit to detect binary touching information for their remotebrained small humanoid robot.…”