A new design of a fingertip for the iCub hand

Nawid Jamali, Marco Maggiali, Francesco Giovannini, Giorgio Metta, Lorenzo Natale

Abstract: Tactile sensing is of fundamental importance for object manipulation and perception. Several sensors for hands have been proposed in the literature, however, only a few of them can be fully integrated with robotic hands. Typical problems preventing integration include the need for deformable sensors that can be deployed on curved surfaces, and wiring complexity. In this paper we describe a fingertip for the hands of the iCub robot, each fingertip consists of 12 sensors. Our approach builds on previous work on the iCub tactile system. The sensing elements of the fingertip are capacitive sensors made from a flexible PCB, and a multi-layer fabric that includes the dielectric material and the conductive layer. The novelty the proposed sensor lies in incorporating the multi-layer fabric technology into a small fingertip sensor that can be attached to the hands of a humanoid robot. The new sensors are more robust. The manufacturing is easier and relies on industrial techniques for the fabrication of the components, which results in higher repeatability. We performed experimental characterization of the sensor. We show that the sensor is able to detect forces as low as 0.05 N with no cross-talk between the taxels. We identified some hysteresis in the response of the sensor which must be taken into account if the robot exerts large forces for a long period of time. The taxels have spatially overlapping receptive fields, this has been demonstrated to be a useful property that allows hyperacuity.