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Robots that work with humans require a soft sensor skin to cover the entire body. In this paper, we propose a new method to realize such a skin. By implanting wireless sensing elements in an elastic body, we obtain an elastic and tough sensor skin which is able to be shaped freely. The element is a passive resonator chip whose resonant frequency reflects the stress around the chip. The resonant frequency is read out by a ground coil located at the bottom of the skin. The chip is simply composed of three functional parts: a coil for receiving and transmitting electrical power with wireless coupling, capacitance sensitive to stress, and ceramic resonator to provide high-Q resonance. The high quality factor brought by the ceramic resonator enables one to distinguish a large number of chips, and to sense the stress with high accuracy. The structure, the method of wireless signal detection, and basic experiments of tactile sensing are presented.
Shinoda et al. (Sat,) studied this question.