A middleware for whole body skin-like tactile systems

In this article a software architecture for acquiring, processing and presenting distributed tactile information in real time is discussed. When humanoid robots are endowed with large scale tactile systems, the need arises to design a framework able to abstract from the underlying robot hardware structure. The article describes relevant functional requirements, architectural choices and specific technical solutions. Experiments show results with respect to a realistic use case, i.e., a humanoid robot fully covered with artificial skin.