Human-machine interaction through object using robot arm with tactile sensors

This paper presents a tactile interaction system for human-machine interaction and an active sensing technique to realize object surface sensing for human-machine interaction tasks. The tactile sensor unit implemented on the robot hand consists of three force-sensitive resistors arranged triangularly. The unit not only can detect the reactive force from the object but also determine the orientation of the object surface. Our research goal is to realize an effective robot controller for the 3D object handling. As a possible application, we also introduce an effective human-robot cooperation to move an object together. This application is realized by a control of a hand pose to keep the direction of the hand normal to the object surface in 3-D, which is often necessary when pushing an object. We also show the experimental results using the proposed sensor unit.