Development of Soft Areal Tactile Sensors for Human-Interactive Robots

Human-interactive robots, such as for nursing, which share humans' environments with and interact with them, should be covered with soft areal tactile sensors for safety and dexterous manipulation. We are developing such tactile sensors by embedding semiconductor pressure sensors in an elastic body. We have so far established a method of fabricating flat tactile sensors. We have also proposed a structure of the elastic body consisting of soft and hard elastic materials for improving the sensitivity of our tactile sensors. However it was still difficult to fix the sensor on a curved surface while keeping a bent shape, though the sensor we developed was flexible. In the current paper, we propose a method of fabricating a curved tactile sensor in order to mount it on a curved robot surface. We also report experimental results of our tactile sensors and a robot arm with curved tactile sensors.