Contact based robot control through tactile maps

This paper deals with the problem of controlling a robot during a physical interaction through a representation of its tactile system. Although the force feedback has been widely used to control the interaction with objects (e.g., object grasping and manipulation), the use of tactile data in more complex interaction tasks did not receive a comparable attention. The lack of an available skin-like technology has limited the development of tactile based control strategies. The major contribution of this paper is to describe a control strategy controlling the interaction task of a robot arm, equipped with tactile sensors, in contact with an external object or human through the somatosensory map. Experiments are used to validate the approach.