Fine-grained robotic touch sensing is essential for tasks such as robot-human interaction and the handling of hazardous materials. Yet, the sense of touch of robots is limited by the cost and complexity of routing cables to embedded sensors. This paper tackles this problem by contributing Silicone Ethernet (SEth), a wireless solution for touch sensing, communication and power transfer within a conductive silicone substrate. SEth~\emph{neurons} require no battery and deliver computation, communication, sensing and energy harvesting within a compact package. These neurons are placed into an undifferentiated conductive silicone substrate which may form the entire body of a soft robot, or an outer `skin' for hard robots. Our evaluation shows that SEth achieves data rates of 100\,kbps with sub-$μ$W receive and mW-scale transmit power. Exploiting the unique properties of the conductive silicone substrate, SEth provides prioritized traffic arbitration similar to that found in wired control networks such as CAN. The SEth network inherently supports capacitive touch and presence sensing and neurons can harvest sufficient energy to transmit 10s of messages per second at a range of 1\,m. Considered in sum, these features open new degrees of freedom in touch sensing for soft robots.

翻译：精细化的机器人触觉感知对于诸如人机交互和危险材料处理等任务至关重要。然而，机器人触觉的发展受限于为嵌入式传感器布线的成本与复杂性。本文通过提出硅胶以太网（SEth）来解决这一问题，这是一种在导电硅胶基底内实现触觉感知、通信和无线能量传输的解决方案。SEth 神经元无需电池，并在一个紧凑封装内集成了计算、通信、传感和能量收集功能。这些神经元被嵌入到一种未分化的导电硅胶基底中，该基底可以构成软体机器人的整个身体，或作为刚性机器人的外部“皮肤”。我们的评估表明，SEth 实现了 100 kbps 的数据速率，接收功耗低于 μW 级，发射功耗为 mW 级。利用导电硅胶基底的独特性质，SEth 提供了类似于 CAN 等有线控制网络中的优先级流量仲裁机制。SEth 网络固有地支持电容式触摸和存在感知，并且神经元能够收集足够的能量，在 1 米范围内以每秒数十条消息的速率进行传输。综合来看，这些特性为软体机器人的触觉感知开辟了新的自由度。