Abstract
Robots that are supposed to work and communicate with humans in our daily life have been developed in recent years. For this kind of robots, sensitive tactile sensors are necessary to achieve haptic interactions. However, noises on tactile sensors caused by a robot’s own motions sometimes become larger than the signal to be detected. This paper proposes a method to reduce such noises. This method is realized by estimating and subtracting noises from sensor outputs. The noises on tactile sensors are estimated by using the sequence of joint angles of the robot. Our method builds upon a partially linear model to estimate noises on a tactile sensor. The robot’s posture space represented by its joint angles is divided into several subspaces to fit to a linear model. We conducted an experiment with a robot covered with tactile sensors to verify the validity of our method. This paper shows that the robot is able to estimate noises on a tactile sensor based on the proposed model.
