A Tactile Sensing System for Robotic Manipulation

Abstract

A tactile sensing system (TSS) for articulated robotic hands is described. The system is composed of flexible touch sensing arrays, access electronics, and algorithms for data sampling and processing. The TSS is meant to exist in a multiprocess ing control environment and is designed to keep low-level procedures such as sensor addressing and data access off of the control system's shared bus. Up to 16 arrays of 256 taxels each can be accessed in parallel with achieved sampling rates of more than 60 Hz. The resolution of the sensors can be dynamically modified by a simple switching technique. This allows very fast sampling rates at low resolution while retain ing the ability to sample with high precision at lower rates. Variance of the resolution changes only the number of taxels and the size of their receptive fields but does not affect the coverage of the array. As part of the discussion about TSS, a generic class of resistive touch sensors is described. These sensors are inex pensive, flexible, and easy to build. Methods for efficient sampling, variable resolution, and shear force detection are introduced, and implementation issues for use with the Utah/ MIT Dextrous Hand are discussed.