Tomographic Artificial Skin for Robotic Application

As technology advances, robots are becoming more and more a part of our daily lives. While industrial robots have already been in use for a several years, an increasing number of robots are also employed in the private environment. Human-robot cooperation requires ways to detect interactions in order to prevent possible harms. This paper presents a novel artificial skin made of conductive rubber for robot end-effectors. Integrated electrodes enable proximity, touch and force detection by combining impedance and capacitance tomography techniques. The results of measurements carried out on a prototype are presented in order to show how the tomographic methods provide a local resolution of the detection of close objects and of the force measurement.