System approach: A paradigm for robotic tactile sensing

In the pursuit of developing touch sensors or tactile sensing arrays, the emphasis has only been on the sensors. This led to a large number of ‘bench top’ sensors, very few of which have actually been used in robotic systems. And those that have seen the actual use have almost invariably been used in static contact point imaging rather than the active manipulation or exploration. Perhaps the lack of the system approach rendered many of them unusable. In this work, we present the design of a tactile sensing system taking into account not only the parameters to be sensed but also the physical and operational constraints of robotic system.