Magnetic-based Soft Tactile Sensors with Deformable Continuous Force Transfer Medium for Resolving Contact Locations in Robotic Grasping and Manipulation

Abstract

The resolution of contact location is important in many applications in robotics and automation. This is generally done by using an array of contact or tactile receptors, which increases cost and complexity as the required resolution or area is increased. Tactile sensors have also been developed using a continuous deformable medium between the contact and the receptors, which allows few receptors to interpolate the information among them, avoiding the weakness highlighted in the former approach. The latter is generally used to measure contact force intensity or magnitude but rarely used to identify the contact locations. This paper presents a systematic design and characterisation procedure ..