Development of sensitive skin for a 3D robot arm operating in an uncertain environment

The authors describe an ongoing research project on the development of a sensitive skin and its control scheme for a 3D robot arm. The skin consists of hundreds of active infrared proximity sensors that cover the whole arm. This sensor-based motion planning system senses obstacles by emitting amplitude-modulated infrared light and then sensing the reflected signal. The problem of interpreting data from the sensors is handled by the step planning algorithm, which transforms the sensor data into local tangent normals in the configuration space. Once this information is available, a global path planning algorithm can then be used to move the arm through freespace or to follow the contour of obstacles that are encountered. Details of the skin design are presented, along with the computer hardware and operating logistics and the sensor data interpretation algorithm that connects this subsystem to the global motion planning subsystem