Haptic Sensing Foot System for Humanoid Robot and Ground Recognition With One-Leg Balance

This paper presents a haptic sensing foot system for humanoid robot. The two different kinds of implementations are investigated: One is an active tactile sensing technique to recognize a contacting ground slope. The other is to balance the robot body with one leg for human-robot interaction. The proposed sensors are implemented on two robotic feet. Each sensing unit on each foot consists of three thin sheets of force sensitive resistors arranged triangularly with the peripheral circuits. The research objective is to produce an artifact which can be operated in a natural and intuitive manner by utilizing the control of a foot pose to keep the direction of the foot normal to the ground surface. Throughout these works, we aim to realize the tactile sensing foot to detect the ground slope for natural foot posture control in order to assist the biped walking robot to balance its body on various types of ground surfaces. In these applications, the information about the ground floor or orientation is not required in advance.