Telemetric Artificial Skin for Soft Robot

Abstract

Robots of new generation to coexist with human harmoniously will require the sensor skin that is soft to cover the whole body. But it would be very difficult to fabricate such a skin with existing technology, because it is laborious to place and wire vast amount of sensor elements on the 3-dimensionally configured robot surface. In this paper we propose a novel method to fabricate such a sensor skin. The skin contains sensor chips which receive the electrical power and transmit the tactile signal without wires. The skin is configured in an arbitrary shape easily, and it is elastic and tough because each sensing element does not need any fragile wires. The fabrication of the prototype telemetry tactile chip and experimental results of multiple chip signal detection are shown.