Real-time reconstruction of contact shapes for large area robot skin

Abstract

Tactile sensing is considered a key technology for implementing complex robot interaction tasks. The contribution of this article is two-fold: (i) we propose a general-purpose algorithm for the reconstruction of deformation and force distributions for capacitance-based skin-like systems; (ii) real-time performance can be tuned according to available computational resources, which leads to an any-time formulation. Experiments (both in simulation and with real robot skin) provide a quantitative analysis of results.