Soft magnetic skin for super-resolution tactile sensing with force self-decoupling

Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 2021 papers

Abstract

Human skin can sense subtle changes of both normal and shear forces (i.e., self-decoupled) and perceive stimuli with finer resolution than the average spacing between mechanoreceptors (i.e., super-resolved). By contrast, existing tactile sensors for robotic applications are inferior, lacking accurate force decoupling and proper spatial resolution at the same time. Here, we present a soft tactile sensor with self-decoupling and super-resolution abilities by designing a sinusoidally magnetized flexible film (with the thickness ~0.5 millimeters), whose deformation can be detected by a Hall sensor according to the change of magnetic flux densities under external forces. The sensor can accurately measure the normal force and the shear force (demonstrated in one dimension) with a single unit and achieve a 60-fold super-resolved accuracy enhanced by deep learning. By mounting our sensor at the fingertip of a robotic gripper, we show that robots can accomplish challenging tasks such as stably grasping fragile objects under external disturbance and threading a needle via teleoperation. This research provides new insight into tactile sensor design and could be beneficial to various applications in robotics field, such as adaptive grasping, dexterous manipulation, and human-robot interaction.

Related Papers

• → Superresolution with an optical tactile sensor(2015)95 cited
• → Piezoresistive Tactile Sensor Discriminating Multidirectional Forces(2015)83 cited
• → Shear force measurement using a rubber based tactile matrix sensor(2002)11 cited
• → 1210 An Experimental Tactile Sensor Based on Optical Flow(2010)
• → 3210 Three-axial force detection based on optical flow in optical tactile sensors(2008)