A multiple sensor platform with dedicated CMOS-LSIs for robot applications

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in robots' tactile sense, which enables safer, more reliable and accurate human-robot communication for the future society. So far, we have developed a capacitive type tactile sensor network system for implementing a large number of sensors with MEMS-CMOS integration technologies [1–3, 9]. Considering practical use for the robot, multiple kind sensors in addition to numerous sensor distributions are necessary in terms of accurate object recognition and wide coverage of sensor requirements such as high-sensitivity, large dynamic range, high-reliability and low-cost. Thus, we proposed a sensor platform with dedicated CMOS-LSIs [6], which can utilize three types of sensors: on-chip temperature, off-chip capacitive and resistive tactile sensors. The CMOS-LSI is well designed for integration with MEMS. This paper describes the first implementation results of the multiple kind sensors with the CMOS-LSIs. We successfully constructed the multi sensor system, which has the temperature sensor, capacitive and resistive type force sensors.