Haptic Intelligence

An ERT-Based Robotic Skin with Sparsely Distributed Electrodes: Structure, Fabrication, and DNN-Based Signal Processing

2020

Conference Paper

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Electrical resistance tomography (ERT) has previously been utilized to develop a large-scale tactile sensor because this approach enables the estimation of the conductivity distribution among the electrodes based on a known physical model. Such a sensor made with a stretchable material can conform to a curved surface. However, this sensor cannot fully cover a cylindrical surface because in such a configuration, the edges of the sensor must meet each other. The electrode configuration becomes irregular in this edge region, which may degrade the sensor performance. In this paper, we introduce an ERT-based robotic skin with evenly and sparsely distributed electrodes. For implementation, we sprayed a carbon nanotube (CNT)-dispersed solution to form a conductive sensing domain on a cylindrical surface. The electrodes were firmly embedded in the surface so that the wires were not exposed to the outside. The sensor output images were estimated using a deep neural network (DNN), which was trained with noisy simulation data. An indentation experiment revealed that the localization error of the sensor was 5.2 ± 3.3 mm, which is remarkable performance with only 30 electrodes. A frame rate of up to 120 Hz could be achieved with a sensing domain area of 90 cm2. The proposed approach simplifies the fabrication of 3D-shaped sensors, allowing them to be easily applied to existing robot arms in a seamless and robust manner.

Author(s): Kyungseo Park and Hyunkyu Park and Hyosang Lee and Sungbin Park and Jung Kim
Book Title: 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2020)
Pages: 1617--1624
Year: 2020
Month: May
Publisher: IEEE
Department(s): Haptic Intelligence
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)
Paper Type: Conference
DOI: 10.1109/ICRA40945.2020.9197361
Event Name: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2020)
Event Place: Paris
Address: Piscataway, NJ
ISBN: 978-1-7281-7395-5
State: Published

BibTex 

@inproceedings{Park20-ICRA-Skin,
  title = {An {ERT}-Based Robotic Skin with Sparsely Distributed Electrodes: Structure, Fabrication, and {DNN}-Based Signal Processing},
  author = {Park, Kyungseo and Park, Hyunkyu and Lee, Hyosang and Park, Sungbin and Kim, Jung},
  booktitle = {2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2020)},
  pages = {1617--1624},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  address = {Piscataway, NJ},
  month = may,
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.1109/ICRA40945.2020.9197361},
  month_numeric = {5}
}