Uniform Cellular Design of Artificial Robotic Skin

Abstract:
The development of artificial robotic skin is motivated by the necessity to provide robots with a rich and direct feedback of their interaction with themselves and the world. In this paper, we present a technology independent approach to build artificial skin from hexagonal shaped, intelligent unit cells, featuring cell-2-cell communication. The uniform design of the building block enables mass production and pushes transferability across various robotic systems. Based on the intelligent unit cell and redundant cell-2-cell communication, flexible and fault tolerant network self-organizing methods can be realized. With HEX-o-SKIN we introduce an implementation based on standard technologies.