Extendable Tactile Sensor Suit with Electro-Plated Knitting

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This research aims developing a method of extendable tactile sensor suit which can cover the whole-body of a robot body. The basic idea of the tactile sensor suit is to build sensing clothing with electrically plated fabric. The clothes has distributed many sensing units. Each unit is built a sort of mechanical switch which has a layer of the patch of electrically plated fabric and normal fabric as insulators. The wiring from all the units to the brain computing system are built with the electrically plated strings. The advantage of this sensing suit system is to have softness and flexibility that can cover all over the robot body.When a robot wears the tactile sensing suit, the suit may disturb the robot motion caused by the extensibility. When we design the suit tight to the robot body, it is required to have extensibility in its suit. In order to give extensibility into the sensing suit, we adopt a method to build the extensible fabric with knitting structure. The knitting structure is not weaving structure and composed of single string. We have reconstructed the fabric patch of the tactile sensing unit as knitting. The sensing mechanism is same. The tactile sensing suit allows us to perform many tactile-sensor based interactive behaviors on a many-DOF humanoid.