A toolbox for supporting the design of large-scale capacitive tactile systems

In the process of covering a generic robot with artificial skin, it is necessary to use design tools allowing designers to specify and validate tactile requirements for the scenario at hand. In particular, given a set of well-defined functional requirements (e.g., minimum spatial sensitivity or minimum force to detect), there are two needs to be fulfilled: (i) to check the artificial skin capability to meet these requirements and criteria; (ii) to drive the customization process to find a reasoned trade-off between different (and possibly conflicting) design parameters, such as dielectric thickness or taxel diameter. The main contribution of this article is the description of a robot skin design toolbox based on Finite Element Analysis, able to provide the designer with insights in the behaviour of large scale tactile systems.