力計測と接触位置検出を同時に行う柔軟触覚センサの開発
Development of Soft Tactile Sensor for Force Measurement and Position Detection
人間の皮膚を模した二層構造の柔軟触覚センサを開発し、導電性布と導電性ゴムの信号から接触力と接触位置を同時に推定できることを実験で示した。
著者: Wu-Te Yang, Zhian Kuang, Changhao Wang, Masayoshi Tomizuka
分類: cs.RO
原文アブストラクト
As more robots are implemented for contact-rich tasks, tactile sensors are in increasing demand. For many circumstances, the contact is required to be compliant, and soft sensors are in need. This paper introduces a novelly designed soft sensor that can simultaneously estimate the contact force and contact location. Inspired by humans' skin, which contains multi-layers of receptors, the designed tactile sensor has a dual-layer structure. The first layer is made of a conductive fabric that is responsible for sensing the contact force. The second layer is composed of four small conductive rubbers that can detect the contact location. Signals from the two layers are firstly processed by Wheatstone bridges and amplifier circuits so that the measurement noises are eliminated, and the sensitivity is improved. An Arduino chip is used for processing the signal and analyzing the data. The contact force can be obtained by a pre-trained model that maps from the voltage to force, and the contact location is estimated by the voltage signal from the conductive rubbers in the second layer. In addition, filtering methods are applied to eliminate the estimation noise. Finally, experiments are provided to show the accuracy and robustness of the sensor.
