Development of soft stretchable knit sensor for humanoids' whole-body tactile sensibility

In order for humanoid robots to behave with soft contacts among humans, whole-body tactile sensing function is indispensable. For enclosing whole-body regions of a humanoid, softness and the stretchable property is necessary especially for the regions around joints. Although there are some studies to realize a whole-body enclosing-type tactile sensing exterior so far, most of them have difficulties to enclose the joint regions. Therefore, we propose the method to construct a soft stretchable enclosing type tactile sensing exterior using electro-conductive knitting structure and about 200% stretchable and pressure sensitive exterior can be realized. Furthermore cardigan type knit sensor exterior is developed and the feasibility of the proposed method is confirmed through behavior experiments by a humanoid wearing the developed cardigan knit sensor.