Authors’ Reply

In a recent survey paper [1], we reviewed the state of tactile sensing with regard to its effective utilization in robotics. Section IV-E of this paper highlights the need for low power consumption by the tactile sensors as one of the requirements for improving effective use of tactile sensing in robotics. In this context, some sensors based on optical transduction (known to consume high power) have been reported as examples. One of these examples is from the paper by De Maria et al. [2] The phrase that de Maria et al.. question in [1] says, “optoelectronic transducers [169] present a fairly high power consumption, e.g., 200 mW per taxel.” De Maria et al., the authors of [169] (numbered here as [2]) find this phrase erroneous, and point out that the 200-mW figure actually relates to 16 (not one) sensors in their prototype reported in [2]. We thank de Maria et al. for pointing this out. The confusion might have occurred due to a less than clear distinction in [2] between a sensor and sensor array due to which we assumed that their phrase, “power consumption less than 200 mW for the whole sensor” relates to one sensor rather than 16 sensors. Thus corrected, the sensor described in [2] will consume about 12.5 mW, rather than 200 mW as we wrote in [1].