Architecture of a tactile sensor suite for artificial hands based on FPGAs

Tactile sensing is a serious issue in assistive robotics or prosthetics. It requires the hands and body of the robot are equipped with many tactile arrays, and a large amount of data has to be acquired and transmitted to a central decision unit. Moreover, this has to be done in a very short time to improve dexterity and performance in service tasks Therefore, the local electronics of a smart tactile patch must be powerful enough to acquire and pre-process data in real time to cope with the limited throughput of the communication buses. This paper presents an architecture based on FPGAs that implements a direct interface with the sensor without analog-to-digital converters and robust serial communications between the electronics in the finger tips, mid-digits and palm.