1 research outputs found
Comparing Piezoresistive Substrates for Tactile Sensing in Dexterous Hands
While tactile skins have been shown to be useful for detecting collisions
between a robotic arm and its environment, they have not been extensively used
for improving robotic grasping and in-hand manipulation. We propose a novel
sensor design for use in covering existing multi-fingered robot hands. We
analyze the performance of four different piezoresistive materials using both
fabric and anti-static foam substrates in benchtop experiments. We find that
although the piezoresistive foam was designed as packing material and not for
use as a sensing substrate, it performs comparably with fabrics specifically
designed for this purpose. While these results demonstrate the potential of
piezoresistive foams for tactile sensing applications, they do not fully
characterize the efficacy of these sensors for use in robot manipulation. As
such, we use a high density foam substrate to develop a scalable tactile skin
that can be attached to the palm of a robotic hand. We demonstrate several
robotic manipulation tasks using this sensor to show its ability to reliably
detect and localize contact, as well as analyze contact patterns during
grasping and transport tasks.Comment: 10 figures, 8 pages, submitted to ICRA 202