Contact Modelling and Tactile Data Processing for Robot Skins.

Journal: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Published Date:

Abstract

Tactile sensing is a key enabling technology to develop complex behaviours for robots interacting with humans or the environment. This paper discusses computational aspects playing a significant role when extracting information about contact events. Considering a large-scale, capacitance-based robot skin technology we developed in the past few years, we analyse the classical Boussinesq⁻Cerruti's solution and the Love's approach for solving a distributed inverse contact problem, both from a qualitative and a computational perspective. Our contribution is the characterisation of the algorithms' performance using a freely available dataset and data originating from surfaces provided with robot skin.

Authors

  • Wojciech Wasko
    Nvidia Corporation, 83304 Przodkowo, Poland. wojciech@wasko.io.
  • Alessandro Albini
    Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and Systems Engineering, University of Genoa, 16145 Genova, Italy. alessandro.albini@unige.it.
  • Perla Maiolino
    Department of Engineering Science, Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6NN, UK. perla.maiolino@eng.ox.ac.uk.
  • Fulvio Mastrogiovanni
    Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and Systems Engineering, University of Genoa, 16145 Genova, Italy. fulvio.mastrogiovanni@unige.it.
  • Giorgio Cannata
    Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and Systems Engineering, University of Genoa, 16145 Genova, Italy. giorgio.cannata@unige.it.