Robot sensor experience-two case studies

Describes two projects, the first of these is aimed at developing general purpose tactile systems, the other is concerned with the development of an anthropomorphic robot head. The tactile project performed extensive experiments with Lord LTS-200 and LTS-300 arrays but eventually concluded that, for the majority of tactile applications, vibration sensors turned out to be more useful. This conclusion was based in part on an appreciation that it was possible to recover spatial information from a vibration sensor that was itself moving in a predictable way. The second project has been in the development of a robot head prototype featuring six degrees of freedom, two cameras, two microphones and a speech generator. The system is being developed for applications in security and surveillance