While tactile skins have been shown to be useful for detecting collisions between a robotic arm and its environment, they have not been extensively used for improving robotic grasping and in-hand manipulation. We propose a novel sensor design for use in covering existing multi-fingered robot hands. We analyze the performance of four different piezoresistive materials using both fabric and anti-static foam substrates in benchtop experiments. We find that although the piezoresistive foam was designed as packing material and not for use as a sensing substrate, it performs comparably with fabrics specifically designed for this purpose. While these results demonstrate the potential of piezoresistive foams for tactile sensing applications, they do not fully characterize the efficacy of these sensors for use in robot manipulation. As such, we use a low density foam substrate to develop a scalable tactile skin that can be attached to the palm of a robotic hand. We demonstrate several robotic manipulation tasks using this sensor to show its ability to reliably detect and localize contact, as well as analyze contact patterns during grasping and transport tasks. Our project website provides details on all materials, software, and data used in the sensor development and analysis: https://sites.google.com/gcloud.utah.edu/piezoresistive-tactile-sensing/.
翻译:虽然触摸皮肤被证明对探测机器人臂及其环境之间的碰撞有用,但并未被广泛用于改进机器人臂及其环境之间的碰撞,也没有被广泛用于改进机器人的捕捉和手控操作。 我们提议使用一种新的传感器设计,以覆盖现有的多指机器人手; 我们分析四种不同的碎裂性材料的性能,使用纤维和抗静态泡沫基质进行轮椅实验。 我们发现,尽管碎裂性泡沫是设计成包装材料,而不是用作感应基质,但它与专门为此目的设计的布料具有可比性。 虽然这些结果显示了用于触摸感应应用的碎性泡沫的潜力,但它们并没有充分描述这些传感器在机器人操作中的功效。 因此,我们使用低密度泡沫基质来开发可缩缩缩的触动性皮肤,可以与机器人手的掌相连接。 我们演示了几种机器人操纵任务,以显示其可靠地探测和本地化接触的能力,以及分析在捕捉和运输任务中的接触模式。 我们的项目网站提供了用于遥感/感官/感官分析的所有数据/感官材料。