A novel tactile palm for robotic object manipulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new soft tactile palm sensor for robots, mimicking human palm functionality to improve object contact estimation during manipulation tasks.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel tactile sensor design that replicates human palm sensing, expanding tactile sensing capabilities beyond fingertips.

Findings

Effective contact state estimation demonstrated

Sensor design mimics human palm functionality

Successful experiments validate the approach

Abstract

Tactile sensing is of great importance during human hand usage such as object exploration, grasping and manipulation. Different types of tactile sensors have been designed during the past decades, which are mainly focused on either the fingertips for grasping or the upper-body for human-robot interaction. In this paper, a novel soft tactile sensor has been designed to mimic the functionality of human palm that can estimate the contact state of different objects. The tactile palm mainly consists of three parts including an electrode array, a soft cover skin and the conductive sponge. The design principle are described in details, with a number of experiments showcasing the effectiveness of the proposed design.