Equipping industrial deep-sea manipulators with a sense of touch

Tactile manipulation underwater is a topic still mainly bound to research applications. To change the situation, a drop-in replacement for the jaw gripper of an industrial deep-sea manipulator is developed that is equipped with tactile sensing elements. Special focus has been paid to the robustness of the tactile sensing elements, so that it might operate under the harsh environmental conditions during offshore operations. This paper discusses the system design and the sensor performance of the developed gripper module