Physical awareness is essential for enabling humanoid robots to achieve safe and seamless interaction with human partners. This study details the development of a biomimetic forearm featuring a distributed, vision-based tactile skin designed for full-surface perception. By employing a compliant elastomeric interface and internal optical tracking, the integrated system bypasses the mechanical fragility and wiring bottlenecks inherent in traditional electronic skins. A spatiotemporal learning framework was developed to classify complex touch gestures with high precision. Experimental validation yields a 97.4% classification accuracy, confirming the system’s capacity to interpret human intent. This work provides a scalable, robust pathway for integrating high-resolution tactile intelligence into large-scale humanoid appendages.
Lac Van Duong (Mon,) studied this question.