Better Manipulation with Human Inspired Tactile Sensing

Introduction: Understanding what properties of the human hand can to be incorporated in robotic hands has been an active area of investigation for a long time. Good strides have been made in designing robotic hands and a number of working dexterous robotic hands have also been built [1, 2]. However, the use of touch sensory (both, cutaneous/tactile/extrinsic as well as kinesthetic/intrinsic) information for dexterous manipulation still lags the mechanical capability of such hands. This work presents how extrinsic touch sensing, the cutaneous/tactile analogous of human sense of touch in robotics, can help improving the manipulation capability of robotics hands. Some features of human cutaneous sense, namely, the role of skin biomechanics and skin microstructures, the spatio-temporal response, information coding and transfer are presented as they may help extending the usage of tactile sensing in robotic manipulation. If introduced, such features can help extending the intrinsic touch sensing and tendon driven based gross manipulation capability of present day robotic hands to precise manipulation. The discussion is followed by presenting the POSFET (Piezoelectric Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor) based tactile sensing arrays, inspired from cutaneous/tactile sense of touch in humans, for the fingertips of humanoid robot „iCub‟ [3].