NEXT GENERATION TACTILE SENSING FOR HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION IN INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Abstract

Tactile sensing is commonly viewed as one of the basic forms of sensing [24] – intelligent life is rarely found without some capacity for tactile sensing – and it is a fundamental sense in human perception [24, 29]; however it is a sensing modality which few robots currently benefit from. With robotics gradually becoming more dextrous and intelligent, their application areas are expanding from restricted safety enclosures, to being on the production floor next to human co-workers and leading toward increasingly flexible manufacturing, as is already being seen with the recent rise of collaborative robotics in industry. This paper aims to explore how extrinsic tactile sensing can assist in this progress by being a facilitating technology for developing complex Human-Robot Interaction, and the key engineering challenges behind implementing advanced extrinsic tactile sensing.