Measuring and Analyzing Human Wide-Area Contact Motion using Tactile Sensors*

This paper proposes a framework for measuring human motions involving surface contacts by collecting data from distributed tactile sensors and motion capture systems simultaneously. Although contacts play an important role in natural robot interaction with humans and environments, their high complexity makes contact-rich motions challenging for even advanced humanoid robots. One possible approach is to learn from humans who generate such motions with ease in their daily lives. While analysis of human contact motions can lead to understanding human motion strategy to improve robots’ motion capacity and robustness, access to human motion data including contacts is still limited. This paper addresses this issue by establishing a method for obtaining human motions with wide-area contacts. The contact information measured by the tactile sensors is mapped on the human body through position-orientation and force registration, and unified with synchronized body motion data. A series of experiments have been conducted to validate the physical quality of the force measurement and demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective in acquiring whole-body contact motions.