Tactile Super-Resolution Model for Soft Magnetic Skin

Tactile sensors of high spatial resolution can provide rich contact information in terms of accurate contact location and force magnitude for robots. However, achieving a high spatial resolution normally requires a high density of tactile sensing cells (or taxels), which will inevitably lead to crowded wire connections, more data acquisition time and probably crosstalk between taxels. An alternative approach to improve the spatial resolution without introducing a high density of taxels is employing super-resolution technology. Here, we propose a novel tactile super-resolution method based on a sinusoidally magnetized soft magnetic skin, by which we have achieved a 15-fold improvement of localization accuracy (from 6 mm to 0.4 mm) as well as the ability to measure the force magnitude. Different from the existing super-resolution methods that rely on overlapping signals of neighbouring taxels, our model only relies on the local information from a single 3-axis taxel and thereby can detect multipoint contact applied on neighboring taxels and work properly even when some of the neighbouring taxels near the contact position are damaged (or unavailable). With this property, our method would be robust to damage and could potentially benefit robotic applications that require multipoint contact detection.