Design and development of a low power Tactile Multi-Sensor Network for robotic systems

This paper describes the design, implementation and experimental results of a low power Tactile Multi-sensor Network for haptic and robotic applications. A whole-body tactile system will provide the robots with awareness of themselves, and a communication channel to translate dermal messages which could contain emotions. Robots with a sense of touch will have an advantage in alertness and responsiveness for future applications. The proposed Tactile System is composed of individual nodes capable of preprocessing information obtained from multiple sensors, with an embedded microcontroller. Thereby, the tactile information could be delivered to upper layers of supervision for higher cognitive processing. The haptic sensor network is biological inspired by the human tactile system which is able to detect vibration, temperature, contact and pressure. The preliminary experiments of the tactile system demonstrate its reliability, high efficiency in power consumption, wiring simplification, and easy manufacturability. These features will allow the multi-sensor network to be scaled to large number of sensors and nodes in order to cover large surfaces of robotic applications.