Tactile Sensing – From Humans to Humanoids

Starting from human sense of touch, this paper reviews the state of tactile sensing in robotics. The physiology, coding, and transferring tactile data and perceptual importance of the sense of touch in humans are discussed. Following this, a number of design hints derived for robotic tactile sensing are presented. Various technologies and transduction methods used to improve the touch sense capability of robots are presented. Tactile sensing, focused to fingertips and hands until past decade or so, has now been extended to whole body, even though many issues remain open. Trend and methods to develop tactile sensing arrays for various body sites are presented. Finally, various system issues that keep tactile sensing away from widespread utility are discussed