Abstract
There are growing interests in the use of robots in collaborative environments with humans or other intelligent machines. Sensing the environment for which the robot is operating can be done in many ways, generally guided by skin-like sensors. Some of the skins are inspired by natural sensing in humans or other species. As humans, we use many of our senses, such as version, hearing, smell, and touch, to move around by avoiding colliding with other humans or objects. Different from humans, many other mammals also use whiskers as an additional sensor to help navigate around. In this paper, we demonstrate a touchless capacitive imaging-based sensor in the situation where the obstacles are in close vicinity to the robot. The proposed imaging system can sense the changes in areas near to the skin-like sensors by measuring the capacitances between the array of electrodes. A 4D sensing approach has been developed with the spatiotemporal Total Variation algorithm. The 4D operational mode gives sensors the time awareness that allows for dynamical responses and hence the better control of the robots. Several experiments are conducted to show the skin-like behaviour of this sensor by simulating various scenarios. The sensor shows the excellent ability to detect an object in its vicinity, where the depth is close to half of the planar sensor array size.
Highlights
There are growing interests in the use of robots in collaborative environments with humans or other intelligent machines
Though the gold standard is still based on the vision system, it is critical to have the additional sensors for robots to detect an approaching human or an unwanted object
An ultimate use of artificial skin for robotic operation is the identification of the obstacles, which enables the robots to operate in an unexpected environment
Summary
In ECT, one needs to address the forward problem and the inverse problem to generate images. The forward problem is the process of evaluating the capacitances when the electric field is applied across the area of two electrodes. The inverse problem is the process of reconstructing the permittivity distribution through the capacitance measurements. The inverse problem can be solved after building the forward problem model
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
