Robotic Tactile Sensor System and Applications

This paper presents a tactile sensor system for a robot manipulator and an active-sensing technique to realize 3-D object recognitions concerning object shape, object surface normal, and object edge tracing with experimental results. The proposed tactile sensor units implemented on the robot hand consist of three thin sheets of force-sensitive resistors arranged triangularly with the peripheral circuits. One potential application of the proposed techniques is to realize an effective human-robot cooperation to move an object together by utilizing the control of a hand pose to keep the direction of the hand normal to the object surface in three dimensions, which is often necessary when pushing an object. Another is a 3-D object edge tracing. The proposed techniques can be employed in industrial processes such as welding and inspection to eliminate manual teaching procedures for searching the object edge automatically before doing the welding process. In these applications, information about the object shape or orientation is not required in advance.