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  • Soft-Material-Based Highly Reliable Tri-Axis Tactile Thin-Film Sensors for Robotic Manipulation Tasks

Research Area

Author

  • Kei Tsukamoto, Akira Ebisui, Tetsuro Goto, Yoshiaki Sakakura, Ken Kobayashi, Satoshi Sato, Takahiro Kamei, Yutaka Imai, Kazumasa Nomoto
  • * External authors

Company

  • Sony Group Corporation

Venue

  • Sensors

Date

  • 2021

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Soft-Material-Based Highly Reliable Tri-Axis Tactile Thin-Film Sensors for Robotic Manipulation Tasks

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Abstract

Tactile sensing is essential for intelligent robot control such as for dexterous manipulation tasks. To provide reliable sensors that can withstand industrial applications, we have developed a soft and thin-film tactile sensor capable of detecting tri-axis force components including normal and shear forces. The thickness of the sensor is 5.5 mm, and the sensor can be easily attached on an end-effector. Two layers of capacitive-sensing-electrode arrays sandwiching an elastomer layer of 2-mm spatial resolution are embedded in soft material, and output signals are distributed. To measure the external force vector, center-of-distributed-signal calculation was conducted. Our sensor exhibited linear behavior within 0.1 to 10 N for normal force and 0.1 to 4 N for shear force. With high reliability, sensor sensitivity did not change over ±10.0% even after one million repetitive keystroke cycles and one million repetitive shear-movement cycles. To determine the sensor’s effectiveness for manipulation tasks, a grasping-force control experiment was conducted using sensor signal feedback, and multiple local-shear-force vectors were successfully calculated using area-divided methods.

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