Tactile Images Generation from Contacts Involving Adjacent Robot Links

Tactile data processing or classification is commonly performed using tactile images, i.e. two-dimensional representation of the applied contact. When tactile sensors cover the whole robot body, their relative spatial relations change depending on the robot posture. If the applied contact involves two adjacent links, the current relations among the tactile elements must be considered in order to generate a tactile image that preserves the contact shape. The goal of this paper is to propose a method for creating tactile images from pressure measurement acquired from a large area tactile system, where the relative displacement among the sensors fixed to different links change according to the robot posture. The proposed approach is experimentally validated using a Baxter robot equipped with distributed tactile sensors.