A single-chip multimodal tactile sensor for a robotic gripper

Artificial tactile sensing is a required element to improve robot interaction with objects and their surrounding environment. This work presents a novel tactile sensor composed of one chip that can provide multimodal data including pressure, gyroscope and accelerometer. The chip is mounted on a printed circuit board (PCB), covered with a soft rectangular case made of silicone rubber and placed upside down on a plastic base forming a sandwich arrangement. When pressure is applied to the behind of the PCB board, the chip is pressed against the soft rubber case generating pressure changes. The spatial response, sensitivity and accelerometer and gyroscope data of the sensor are analysed. A three contact point soft tactile sensor is designed as a finger for the RobotiQ gripper to test the sensor capability for contact and slip detection and object grasping. First, pressure data is used for contact detection and object grasping. Second, gyroscope and accelerometer data are explored for human-to-robot and robot-to-human object handover task based on slip detection. Overall, results from the experiments show the proposed multimodal tactile sensor is suitable for robotic applications that required interaction with objects and humans.