TacSuit: A Wearable Large-Area, Bioinspired Multimodal Tactile Skin for Collaborative Robots

Abstract

Robots are now working more and more closely with humans outside of traditional fences in industrial scenes. Their real-time tactile interaction perception is crucial to the safety of human–robot collaboration (HRC). In this work, we present a customized, wearable and modular robot skin (TacSuit), which is scalable for large-area surface coverage of robot with easily accessible multi-modal sensors, including pressure, proximity, acceleration and temperature sensors. The TacSuit is co-designed for mechanical structure and data fusion algorithm, consisting of three levels of design: sensor, cell (of multi-modal sensors) and block (of multiple cells). These sensors are stored with custom-designed and 3D printed capsules to achieve the conformity, scalability and easy installation to the arbitrary robot surface. A multi-level event-driven data fusion algorithm enables efficient information processing for large number of tactile sensors. Furthermore, a virtual interaction force fusion method takes both the proximity and force perception information into consideration in order to achieve safety of whole interaction process before and after direct physical contacts. A humanoid robotic platform successfully realizes the TacSuit wear of 159 tactile cells. Validation experiments of obstacle detection demonstrate the effective collision avoidance capability of the TacSuit for safe HRC.