Live Demonstration: Tactile Events from Off-The-Shelf Sensors in a Robotic Skin

The demonstration presents a robotic event-based tactile infrastructure for a humanoid robot. It leverages on currently deployed sample-based capacitive sensors to generate tactile events, enabling the investigation and development of event-driven tactile applications, and minimizing communication bandwidth and latency. The modular FPGA-based system samples data from tactile sensors and generates address-events, transmitted through an asynchronous serial address-event representation protocol. To enable performance comparisons of the event-driven approach with respect to standard sample-based solutions, the acquisition modules can directly forward the input samples through the same event-based communication channel. We will show in real time a comparison between the tactile events and the original sampled data generated when the skin patch is touched.