BaroTac: Barometric Three-Axis Tactile Sensor with Slip Detection Capability

Tactile sensors for robotic applications enhance the performance of robotic end-effectors as they ca n provide tactile information to operate various tasks. In particular, tactile sensors can measure multi-axial force and detect slip can aid the end-effectors in grasping diverse objects in an unstructured environment. We propose BaroTac, which measures three-axial forces and detects slip with a barometric pressure sensor chip (BPSC) for robotic applications. A BPSC is an off-the-shelf commercial sensor that is inexpensive, easy to customize, robust, and simple to use. While a single BPSC-based tactile sensor can measure pressure, an array of BPSC-based tactile sensors can measure multi-axial force through the reactivity of each sensor and detect slip by observing high frequency due to slip vibration. We first experiment with defining the fundamental characteristics of a single-cell BPSC-based sensor to set the design parameters of our proposed sensor. Thereafter, we suggest the sensing method of BaroTac: calibration matrix for three-axis force measurement and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for slip detection. Subsequently, we validate the three-axis force measuring ability and slip detectability of the fabricated multi-cell BPSC-based tactile sensor. The sensor measures three-axis force with low error (0.14, 0.18, and 0.3% in the X-, Y- and Z-axis, respectively) and discriminates slip in the high-frequency range (75–150 Hz). We finally show the practical applicability of BaroTac by installing them on the commercial robotic gripper and controlling the gripper to grasp common objects based on our sensor feedback.