In the case of the visually impaired, in order to pick up an object, the entire shape is grasped while straddling the object first. When we grasp the characteristics of the object sufficiently by using the tactile sense of the hand, we touch the point which is the center of gravity and listen to the object once. When you want to perform object-graping with only the tactile sense under the conditions of other senses, such as vision, a series of actions is repeated. This paper deals with the behavior based control study of the robot hand using the tactile sense and applied to the 4 DOF hand developed by our laboratory by evolving the subsumption architecture (SA) proposed by R.Brooks.

In this paper, we fabricate arrayed-type flexible capacitive touch sensor using liquid metal (LM) droplets (4 mm spatial resolution). Poly-4-vinylphenol (PVP) layer is used as a dielectric layer on the electrode patterned Polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) film. Bonding tests between hydroxyl group (-OH) on the PVP film and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) are conducted in a various O2 plasma treatment conditions. Through the tests, we can confirm that non-O2 plasma treated PVP layer and O2 plasma treated PDMS can make a chemical bond. To measure dynamic range of the device, one-cell experiments are conducted and we confirmed that the fabricated device has a large dynamic range (~60 pF).

To realize a robot hand interacting like a human hand, there are many tactile sensors sensing normal force, shear force, torque, shape, roughness and temperature. This sensing signal is essential to manipulate object accurately with robot hand. In particular, slip sensors make manipulation more accurate and breakless to object. Up to now several slip sensors were developed and applied to robot hand. Many of them used complicate algorithm and signal processing with vibration data. In this paper, we developed novel principle slip sensor using separation layer. These two layers are moved from each other when slip occur. Developed sensor can sense slip signal by measuring this relative displacement between two layers. Also our principle makes slip signal decoupled from normal force and shear force without other sensors. The sensor was fabricated using the NBR(acrylo-nitrile butadiene rubber) and the Ecoflex as substrate and a paper as dielectric. To verify our sensor, slip experiment and normal force decoupling test were conducted.

Rodents, specially rats, can recognize distance and shape of an object and also pattern of the textures by using their whiskers. Mechanoreceptors surrounding the root of whisker in their follicle measure deflection of the whisker. Rats can move their whisker back and forth freely. This ability, called active whisking or active sensing, is one of characteristics of rat behaviours. Many researches based on the mechanism have been progressed. In this paper, we test a simple and accurate method based on deflection of the whisker: we designed biomimetic whiskers modeling after a structure of follicle using the microphone. The microphone sensor measures a mechanical vibration. Attaching an artificial whisker beam to the microphone membrane, we can detect a vibration of whisker and this can show the deflection amount of whisker indirectly.