Telemetric robot skin

Human-friendly robots of new generation will require sensor skin that is soft and covering the whole body. But it would be very difficult to fabricate it with the traditional technology, because placement and wiring of a vast amount of sensor elements on the 3-dimensionally configured robot surface is laborious. We propose a novel method to fabricate such a sensor skin. The skin contains sensor chips which receive the electrical power and transmit the tactile signal without wires. The skin is configured in an arbitrary shape easily, and it is elastic and tough because each sensing element does not need any fragile wires. The principle and the experimental results are described.