Development of the Flexible Tactile Sensor for Safe Human-Robot Interaction

With the development of industrialization, more and more robots are added to work with hu-man. However, safety accidents occur frequently in human-robot collaborative scenario. In this article, the flexible tactile sensor is designed to promote the security performance of the collaborative robot. The sensor is made by sponge mixed with graphene and it can convert the pressure of the contact surface into a resistance signal accurately. The sensing unit of the sensor shows the correspondence between the input force and output resistance. In addition, a tactile acquisition system is designed to sample pressure data of the sensor. Results of the human-robot interaction experiments indicate that the proposed flexible tactile sensor responds quickly and it can provide robots with reliable perception capability.