Development of soft and distributed tactile sensors and the application to a humanoid robot

This paper describes a comprehensive tactile sensor system which can cover wide areas of full-body robots. Based on design criteria which are introduced from requirements, we develop two types of tactile sensor elements. One is a multi-valued touch sensor which has multi-level pressure thresholds. It is capable of covering wide areas of robot surfaces. The other is made of soft, conductive gel, which has the advantage of compliance compared with other sheet-type tactile sensors. With these two types sensors, we develop the tactile sensor system on the full-body robot 'H4'. Details of the sensor system on the robot and some experiments using tactile information are described.