Tactile sensing: steps to artificial somatosensory maps

In this paper a framework for representing tactile information in robots is discussed. Control models exploiting tactile sensing are fundamental in social Human-Robot interaction tasks. Difficulties arising in rendering the sense of touch in robots are at different levels: both representation and computational issues must be considered. A layered system is proposed, which is inspired from tactile sensing in humans for building artificial somatosensory maps in robots. Experiments in simulation are used to validate the approach.