Skin has been one of the big missing technologies for humanoid robots and would be essential to making them socially acceptable. A team at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa have now come up with the first pieces of touch sensing skin designed for their humanoid robot, the iCub. The skin IIT and its partners have developed contains flexible pressure sensors that aim to put robots in touch with the world. Criteria that the skin has to meet are too many, It must be resilient, able to cover a large surface area and be able to detect even light touches anywhere on that surface. The skin is made up of triangular, flexible printed circuit boards which act as sensors, and it covers much of iCub's body. Each bendy triangle is 3 centimetres to a side and contains 12 capacitive copper contacts. A layer of silicone rubber acts as a spacer between those boards and an outer layer of Lycra that carries a metal contact above each copper contact. The Lycra layer and flexible circuits constitute the two sides of the skin's pressure-sensing capacitors. This arrangement allows 12 "tactile pixels"(or taxels) to be sensed per triangle. This taxel resolution is enough to recognise patterns such as a hand grasping the robot's arm. The skin can detect a touch as light as 1 gram across each taxel. It is also peppered with semiconductor based temperature sensors.[More on this @ Robocub website]
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