TacSuit: A Wearable Large-Area, Bioinspired Multimodal Tactile Skin for Collaborative Robots

TLDR

Robots increasingly collaborate with humans outside traditional safety fences, making real‑time tactile perception essential for safe human–robot interaction. This work introduces TacSuit, a customizable, wearable, modular robot skin that provides large‑area multimodal tactile sensing. TacSuit combines a three‑level design of sensor cells and blocks with 3‑D printed capsules, and employs a multilevel event‑driven data fusion algorithm plus virtual interaction force fusion to process pressure, proximity, acceleration, and temperature signals efficiently. On a humanoid platform, TacSuit covered 159 tactile cells and demonstrated effective collision avoidance in obstacle‑detection experiments, confirming its safety benefits for HRC.

Abstract

Robots are now working more and more closely with humans outside of traditional fences in industrial scenes. Their real-time tactile interaction perception is crucial to the safety of human–robot collaboration (HRC). In this work, we present a customized, wearable, and modular robot skin (TacSuit), which is scalable for large-area surface coverage of robot with easily accessible multimodal sensors, including pressure, proximity, acceleration, and temperature sensors. The TacSuit is co-designed for mechanical structure and data fusion algorithm, consisting of three levels of design: sensor, cell (of multimodal sensors), and block (of multiple cells). These sensors are stored with custom-designed and 3-D printed capsules to achieve the conformity, scalability, and easy installation to the arbitrary robot surface. A multilevel event-driven data fusion algorithm enables efficient information processing for large number of tactile sensors. Furthermore, a virtual interaction force fusion method takes both the proximity and force perception information into consideration in order to achieve safety of whole interaction process before and after direct physical contacts. A humanoid robotic platform successfully realizes the TacSuit wear of 159 tactile cells. Validation experiments of obstacle detection demonstrate the effective collision avoidance capability of the TacSuit for safe HRC.