A Tactile Sensing System Based on Arrays of Piezoelectric Polymer Transducers

Abstract

Tactile sensing enables robots to interact safely and effectively with unstructured environments and humans in case of both voluntary and reactive interaction tasks. Focusing on humanoid robots, there is increasing interest in avoiding negative human feelings towards the “entity” [1], enabling robots to interact with humans in more intuitive and meaningful ways [2-4]. This requires designing methods for extracting important information from tactile stimuli leading to classification of touch modalities [5-8]. It is still unclear, however, whether touch modality actually plays an important role in the communication of social messages. A very interesting research area consists in exploring social touch for robotics through an interpretation of emotions and other social messages [9].