Development of soft stretchable knit sensor for humanoids' whole-body tactile sensibility

In order for humanoid robots to behave with soft contacts among humans, whole-body tactile sensing function is indispensable. For enclosing whole-body regions of a humanoid, softness and the stretchable property is necessary especially for the regions around joints. Although there are some studies to realize a whole-body enclosing-type tactile sensing exterior so far, most of them have difficulties to enclose the joint regions. Therefore, we propose the method to construct a soft stretchable enclosing type tactile sensing exterior using electro-conductive knitting structure and about 200% stretchable and pressure sensitive exterior can be realized. Furthermore cardigan type knit sensor exterior is developed and the feasibility of the proposed method is confirmed through behavior experiments by a humanoid wearing the developed cardigan knit sensor.

I. Introduction

In order for humanoid robots to interact with humans using their whole body as humans themselves do, their body should be soft enough to be touched anywhere and they have to detect where and how they are touched at the same time. For realizing such functionality, wholebody enclosing type exterior with tactile sensing function and stretchable property is indispensable. For example, regions around knee and ankle joints, and also regions around shoulder joints should be stretched smoothly when they are softly touched and guided by humans as shown in Fig. 1.