Multi-Modal Fingertip for Contact Detection and Orientation Estimation

Tactile and orientation information are very important to improve robotic manipulation capabilities in several contexts such as healthcare, industrial, logistic and domestic. This abstract aims at presenting a multi-modal sensing system that optimize accuracy through the integration of tactile sensors, an Inertial measurement unit and a connector for a Time-of-Flight pre-touch sensor. While tactile data enables closed-loop control during grasping operations, the measurements from the inertial unit are elaborated by state-of-the-art sensor fusion algorithms to obtain the sensor orientation in the 3D world.