Tactile Perception for Multifingered Hands

Abstract

Recently, tactile sensors mounted on robot fingers have been identified as essential sensory devices for the control of multifingered robotic hands. A basic tactile sensing task is to determine the force distribution on the contact area between the fingers and grasped object. To increase the grasp stability and to protect the fragile sensors, a kind of elastic material is required to cover the tactile sensors. This thesis derives the relationship between the surface force profile and the stress or strain profile measured by tactile sensors beneath the contract surface for simplified situations. This relationship can be described by integral equations of convolution type, or more generally, integral equations of the first kind with two unknown functions. The algorithms for numerical inversion in real time, an analog network for solving the regularization problem is discussed. Finally, as an application of the tactile sensors, the equilibrium condition for stable grasping by a two-fingered robotic hand is derived.