The DLR artificial skin step II: Scalability as a prerequisite for whole-body covers

In human skin, the ability to spatially discriminate an individual indentation from two simultaneous indentations is tailored to the need of the specific area of application on the human body. While the spatial resolution is comparatively low over wide areas of the human body, there are no insensitive spots. In addition, the measuring range is tuned to the expected loads on the respective part of the human body. Within this study these observations are utilized to solve some of the key challenges on the way towards an artificial skin as a whole-body cover for robotic systems. To enable the reliable detection of collision events which are commonly of very short duration the reaction time of the artificial skin system has to be minimized. In order to do so, the goal conflict between the required number of taxels and the required high readout frequencies has to be solved. We present the DLR approach towards scalable transduction hardware and readout electronics as a basis for the acquisition of tactile information from future whole-body covers. First experiments with prototypes of the DLR Artificial Skin demonstrate the scalability of the transduction hardware with respect to size, spatial resolution and measuring range.