A Tactile Sensing System for Robotic Manipulation

A tactile sensing system (TSS) is described. The system is composed of flexible touch sensing arrays, access electronics, and algorithms for data sampling and processing. The system is meant to exist as part of a multiprocessing control hierarchy and is designed to hide the low level details of sensor addressing and access from the rest of the system. Up to 16 arrays can be accessed in parallel with sampling rates up to 80 Hz. The resolution of the sensors can be dynamically modified by a simple switching technique. This allows very fast sampling rates at low resolution while retaining the ability to sample with high precision at lower rates.