A tactile sensor system for a three-fingered robot manipulator

Tactile sensor systems are an essential prerequisite for the implementation of complex manipulation and exploration tasks using robots. The desire to perform real-time control and pattern recognition with tactile sensors led us to the design of a cost-effective artificial fingertip. At our laboratory two distinct types of sensors are in use: force/position sensors and slippage detectors. We report on first experimental results with a fingertip prototype performing rolling and sliding movements over a flat surface. To facilitate experimentation with tactile sensors, we designed and developed a data acquisition and transportation system that fulfils our demands on bandwidth, flexibility, and cost. This system consists of two hardware components, a configurable multichannel analog signal sampler to acquire sensor data, and an intelligent dual-ported random-access buffer to avoid data transportation bottlenecks