On-chip robotics-Technical issues and future direction


robots are expected to work closely and interact safely with humans as well as real-world objects. Among various sensing modalities needed for this purpose, the sense of touch is particularly important. Unlike other senses (e.g. vision, audio), it involves complex physical interaction, and plays a fundamental role in estimating properties such as shape, texture, hardness, material type and many more. Such properties can be better estimated by touching or physically interacting with the objects – as humans do. The sense of touch also provides action related information, such as slip, and helps in carrying out actions, such as rolling an object between fingers without dropping it. All these, highlight the importance of sense of touch and call for equipping various parts of robot’s body with intrinsic force sensors and extrinsic touch or tactile sensors. The work presented here pertains to the extrinsic touch or tactile sensing.
It is desirable to have tactile sensors over whole body of a robot. However, the robotic hands, especially the fingertips, are accorded higher priority due to their involvement in majority of the daily tasks (such as exploration, manipulation and interaction). Over last more than two decades, a large number of tactile sensors, based on a wide variety of transduction techniques

free-downloadF Arai – … on Micro-Nano Robotics and New Evolution, …, 2010 –

Abstract Micro-nano robotics plays an important role to supply advanced devices and equipments
in Bio-medical engineering and science. There is an increasing interest in miniaturization and
integration of functional devices by MEMS/NEMS technologies. Recent interest is in