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This paper presents an enhanced piezoelectricity based sensor for touch and temperature sensing. The sensor is realized over flexible polyimide film, making it suitable for application like e-skin. The sensing material is composed of Polyvinylidene Fluoride-Trifluoroethylene (PVDF-TrFE) and Barium Titanate (BaTiO3) nanoparticles. While, the piezoelectric polymer PVDF-TrFE ensures the flexibility of...
The lack of sensory feedback in lower-limb amputees is the major cause of (i) amputees difficulty to keep balance, (ii) suboptimal performance in gait functions and (iii) increased energy consumption. This also hugely affects their participation in the activities of daily living. Improving postural control functions in people with lower-limb amputation has the aim to enhance their quality of life...
This paper presents a novel approach for recognizing a human hand touch by processing pressure measurements generated by a robotic skin. Physical cooperation among humans is mainly based on the sense of touch and usually starts with hand contacts. If a robot can distinguish a human touch from a generic contact, the human-robot cooperation can be more natural and effective. The proposed approach consists...
When we touch an object, we can obtain tactile information through our skin. Thus it is important to reveal the relationship between the subjective sensation and objective quantities like the skin vibration elicited on our skin. In this paper, we focus on roughness perception, one of the main tactile sensations of materials. We measured skin vibration and contact force in natural active roughness...
Thin film stretchable sensors are believed to have great applications on devices with curved surface. Among them, electrical skin (e-skin) sensors for pressure measurement have the potential to provide protection to human body by feeding back the contact pressure. One of the applications is to monitor the contact pressure from colonoscope to the colonic wall during a colonoscopy to prevent perforation...
Executing coordinated movements requires that motor and sensory systems cooperate to achieve a motor goal. Impairment of either system may lead to unstable and/or inaccurate movements. In rehabilitation training, however, most approaches have focused on the motor aspects of the control loop. We are examining mechanisms that may enhance the sensory system to improve motor control. More precisely, the...
This paper presents a new approach for active tactile sensation that utilizes soft morphological computation. This work is inspired by human finger's wet-induced wrinkles, which appear after a long time soaking in water, and has been indicated as an efficient means for enhancement of gripping in wet environment. We created a tactile sensing system that is an integration of actuation (pneumatic actuator)...
Skin technology enabled a powerful way to sense the environment in robotic systems. It allows simplifying the formulation of safety tasks such as collision avoidance between the robot, the environment and surrounding objects. In this paper, a hierarchy policy based on tactile feedback is proposed to let a robot interact with its environment while performing a set of tasks. Such policy lets the safety...
In this work we present a novel efficient event-driven reactive skin controller for large scale robot skin. The novel event-driven controller derives from a standard Jacobian torque controller and fully takes advantage of our multi-modal event-driven robot skin. Event-driven systems only sample, transmit and process information when the novelty of the information is guaranteed. This increases their...
In this paper, we present the mechatronic design of our Tactile Omnidirectional Robot Manipulator (TOMM), which is a dual arm wheeled humanoid robot with 6DoF on each arm, 4 omnidirectional wheels and 2 switchable end-effectors (1 DoF grippers and 12 DoF Hands). The main feature of TOMM is its arms and hands which are covered with robot skin. We exploit the multi-modal tactile information of our robot...
Recently, the advent of 3D printers has enabled people to produce a lot of inexpensive and obtainable prosthetics. In addition to that, various sensors have also been developed and used to give intelligent functions to the prosthetics. However, there may be cases where the number of sensors attached to the prosthetics should be limited due to cost, limited space, or power issues as the number of sensors...
This paper reports a novel active body motion sensor with PDMS-AgNWs structure, which is not only highly sensitive to detect body static gestures by strain-resistance response, but also self-powered to recognize both body and prosthesis motion based on triboelectrification and electrostatic induction synchronously for the first time. By attaching the sensor on human skin or robot surface directly,...
This paper presents a low cost, easy to produce, small tactile sensor system, that can be embedded in a soft material and limited space. In the current implementation, we use a Hall-effect sensor and a magnet to measure the force. One sensor module can measure 3D force vector and temperature. This chip is planted inside a 55 × 55 × 8 mm of the silicon layer. The module has I2C digital output, requiring...
This paper presents a novel approach for active tactile sensation that utilizes soft morphological deformation. This work is inspired by human finger's wrinkles, which appear after a long time soaking in water, and has been indicated as an efficient mean for enhancement of gripping in wet environment. We created a tactile sensing system that is an integration of actuation (pneumatic actuator) and...
In-hand manipulation is often needed to accomplish a practical task after grasping an object. In-hand manipulation of variously sized and shaped objects in multi-fingered hands without dropping the object is challenging. In this paper we suggest a combined strategy of force control and passive adaptation through soft fingertips with simple interpolation control to achieve in-hand manipulation between...
All the people have their own individual force ranges to feel the sense of touch and its minimum value is called light touch threshold (in short LTT). For instance, if a touching force is very weak, people do not know whether the object is contacted to their skin, even though it is pushing the skin already. This paper presents a novel apparatus to measure the LTT felt by each subject, which is referred...
Tactile sensing has been used in robotics for object identification, grasping, and material recognition. Most material recognition approaches use vibration signals from a tactile exploration, typically above one second long, to identify the material. This work proposes a tactile multi-modal (vibration and thermal) material identification approach based on recursive Bayesian estimation. Through the...
In this paper we describe how we realized event-based signaling for large scale artificial robotic skin. We developed a new algorithm for the event generation on multi-modal skin cells. The skin cells have two modes, the conventional data sampling mode and the event mode. A comprehensive performance evaluation and comparison of these two modes is presented. We perform different experiments on our...
Touch perception is an important sense to model in humanoid robots to interact physically and socially with humans. We present a neural controller that can adapt the compliance of the robot arm in four directions using as input the tactile information from an artificial skin and as output the estimated torque for admittance control-loop reference. This adaption is done in a self-organized fashion...
Human-in-the-loop task involving soft contact has become common in robotic application, especially in physical human-robot interaction. In this task, it is required that robot would sense interactions with human by touching, as well as assess possibility of human approaching by proximity sensation. In addition, it is also essential to fabricate an interface so that human does not feel uncomfortable...
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