Tactile sensing is of great importance during human hand usage such as object exploration, grasping and manipulation. Different types of tactile sensors have been designed during the past decades, which are mainly focused on either the fingertips for grasping or the upper-body for human-robot interaction. In this paper, a novel soft tactile sensor has been designed to mimic the functionality of human palm that can estimate the contact state of different objects. The tactile palm mainly consists of three parts including an electrode array, a soft cover skin and the conductive sponge. The design principle are described in details, with a number of experiments showcasing the effectiveness of the proposed design.

翻译：触觉感知在人类手部使用过程中至关重要，例如物体探索、抓取和操作。过去几十年中，已设计出多种不同类型的触觉传感器，主要集中于用于抓取的指尖或用于人机交互的上半身。本文设计了一种新型软体触觉传感器，以模拟人类手掌的功能，能够估计不同物体的接触状态。该触觉手掌主要由三部分组成，包括电极阵列、软体覆盖皮肤和导电海绵。详细描述了设计原理，并通过一系列实验展示了所提出设计的有效性。