A simple tactile sensing foot for humanoid robot and active ground slope recognition

This paper presents a tactile sensor foot system for humanoid robot and an active tactile sensing technique to recognize a ground slope with experimental results. A tactile sensor unit implemented on the robot foot consists of three thin sheets of force sensitive resistors arranged triangularly with the peripheral circuits. The proposed tactile sensing foot can detect the ground slope for natural foot pose motions and keep the direction of the foot normal to the ground floor surface. The realized function will assist the biped walking to balance on the different contacted ground slopes such as, flat level surface, up, down, left and right slopes. In these applications, information about the contacted ground floor or orientation is not required in advance.