Abstract
When a humanoid robot works with a human, it is needed for the robot to pass and receive objects. The robot has to detect that the laden objects are operated by the human on the whole body in object passing tasks. It is important that the robot detects not only push but shear generated by pulling action and twist generated by rotating action for the robot to detect human operations. In this paper, we dispersedly arranged 347 multi-axis soft tactile sensors to a humanoid robot. The multi-axis soft tactile sensors are small muti-axis sensors with urethane structure and they can be placed densely on body of a humanoid. We calculate a deformation vector from the deformation of sensor's upper surface using the output of a muti-axis soft tactile sensor. Next, we suggest the method to detect deformation state in contact surface consisting of soft tactile sensors using deformation moment and average of deformation vectors in the contact surface. Finally, we confirmed the usefulness of the fullbody tactile sensor cover and contact state detector by object passing experiment between a human and a robot.
