2018/01/23 by Pedro Piacenza, Piacenza, Pedro, Yuchen Xiao +7
Engineering · Neuroscience · #Advanced Sensor and Energy Harvesting Materials #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Muscle activation and electromyography studies #Robotics (cs.RO) #Tactile and Sensory Interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1801.07792
openalex publication_date 2018/01/23 · openalex created_date 2022/10/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Achieving high spatial resolution in contact sensing for robotic manipulation\noften comes at the price of increased complexity in fabrication and\nintegration. One traditional approach is to fabricate a large number of taxels,\neach delivering an individual, isolated response to a stimulus. In contrast, we\npropose a method where the sensor simply consists of a continuous volume of\npiezoresistive elastomer with a number of electrodes embedded inside. We\nmeasure piezoresistive effects between all pairs of electrodes in the set, and\ncount on this rich signal set containing the information needed to pinpoint\ncontact location with high accuracy using regression algorithms. In our\nvalidation experiments, we demonstrate submillimeter median accuracy in\nlocating contact on a 10mm by 16mm sensor using only four electrodes (creating\nsix unique pairs). In addition to extracting more information from fewer wires,\nthis approach lends itself to simple fabrication methods and makes no\nassumptions about the underlying geometry, simplifying future integration on\nrobot fingers.\n