Pain perception model of human skin using multiple pain sensors

In the coexistence circumstance with human and robot, sensory and emotional feelings of human should be considered in case of interaction. A typical unpleasant feeling influenced by this interaction is pain. In order to keep this interaction safe between human and robot, the pain sensing will be an important ability for the robot. In this paper, we provide a pain sensing system which consists of a pain model and multiple sensor units similar to the laminated-multi-layered structure of human skin. First, the pain model is outlined and a single multi-layered pain sensor unit modeled the laminated structure of human skin is developed. The dynamical characteristics of the developed sensor unit are evaluated in experiments. Secondly, the concept of multiple pain sensor units is explained and the demonstration of stimulated position estimation using multiple sensor units is provided. With this study, we showed that the proposed system gives similar responses to the subjective pain of human and can estimate the pressure point coordinates sufficiently.