Development of a flexible tactile sensor system for a humanoid robot

The application of robots in the same workspace with humans results, intended or unintended, in direct mechanical interaction. This requires additional sensory abilities of the robots. Besides sensor systems that help the robots to structure their environment, like cameras, radar sensors, etc., a sensor system on the robot\´s surface is needed that is able to detect mechanical contacts of the robot with its environment. Because of shadings it is not possible to exclude potential collisions in spite of the "structuring" sensor systems. Therefore a tactile sensor system is essential for reasons of security but also as support of the robot control system and additional communication channel. In this paper we propose the requirements to such a system related to its application on an autonomous humanoid robot. According to these postulated requirements a prototypal system was built and integrated in an existing experimental setup which consists of a redundant robot arm with 7 degrees of freedom in a human-similar kinematics. The sensor and its technical specifications as well as the experimental setup are described in the second part of this paper.