A study on a robotic arm contacting with human skin using tactile sensing feedback strategies

Inspired by human´s tactile sensing in daily lives, we present an approach using the tactile sensing plus force-torque information as the feedback to control the robotic arm interacting with our soft human skin in this paper. Three main types of contact between the end-effector of robotic arm and human skin are introduced and the contact model is built up. Hybrid impedance control method is applied to control both the position and force trajectories of the manipulator at the same time. With the feedback of tactile sensing data such as contact state, contact area and so on, several strategies of tactile sensing feedback are included in the control algorithm. Two groups of real experiments are made using a two-link robotic arm equipped with force/torque and tactile sensors to contact with human skin. The results have confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed strategies.