Design, Mapping, and Contact Anticipation with 3D-printed Whole-Body Tactile and Proximity Sensors
This addresses the need for safer and more responsive robot operation in shared human-robot spaces, representing a novel integration of sensing modalities.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling robots to anticipate contact in dynamic environments by developing GenTact-Prox, a 3D-printed artificial skin integrating tactile and proximity sensing, which achieved detection ranges up to 18 cm and demonstrated online contact prediction on a robot.
Robots operating in dynamic and shared environments benefit from anticipating contact before it occurs. We present GenTact-Prox, a fully 3D-printed artificial skin that integrates tactile and proximity sensing for contact detection and anticipation. The artificial skin platform is modular in design, procedurally generated to fit any robot morphology, and can cover the whole body of a robot. The skin achieved detection ranges of up to 18 cm during evaluation. To characterize how robots perceive nearby space through this skin, we introduce a data-driven framework for mapping the Perisensory Space -- the body-centric volume of space around the robot where sensors provide actionable information for contact anticipation. We demonstrate this approach on a Franka Research 3 robot equipped with five GenTact-Prox units, enabling online object-aware operation and contact prediction.