Abstract
Soft tactile sensors are an attractive solution when robotic systems must interact with delicate objects in unstructured and obscured environments, such as most medical robotics applications. The soft nature of such a system increases both comfort and safety, while the addition of simultaneous soft active actuation provides additional features and can also improve the sensing range. This paper presents the development of a compact soft tactile sensor which is able to measure the profile of objects and, through an integrated pneumatic system, actuate and change the effective stiffness of its tactile contact surface. We report experimental results which demonstrate the sensor’s ability to detect lumps on the surface of objects or embedded within a silicone matrix. These results show the potential of this approach as a versatile method of tactile sensing with potential application in medical diagnosis.
Highlights
There is demand for robotic systems to operate within variable unstructured domains, such as in autonomous exploration or alongside humans (Zou et al, 2017)
We explore the potential of pneumatically actuated soft tactile sensors though the development and experimental characterization of a novel sensor
We investigate the usefulness of varying the effective stiffness of the sensor’s tactile membrane when identifying nodules embedded in a soft medium, coarsely imitating the manual palpation tasks required for clinical breast examinations (CBEs)
Summary
There is demand for robotic systems to operate within variable unstructured domains, such as in autonomous exploration or alongside humans (Zou et al, 2017). Zou et al (2017) highlight the high cost, low modularity and the advancements in micro manufacturing and software processing necessary to implement research sensors practically as key challenges to their adoption By tackling these problems and working toward more generally applicable soft tactile sensor technology, we hope to broaden the range of applications for which robotic systems can be utilized and enable tasks, previously only possible with partial or total human intervention, to be completed autonomously. A wide range of tactile sensing technologies has been developed with successful designs coming from both close biomimicry as well as deviating from nature to incorporate additional capabilities (Zou et al, 2017; Chi et al, 2018) One such deviation proposed in literature comprises adjusting the effective stiffness of the soft tactile membrane via pneumatic actuation in order to allow for the sensitivity and measurement range of the sensor to be adjusted, leading to a more generically applicable sensor (He et al, 2020a; Jenkinson et al, 2020; Zhang et al, 2021).
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