Providing robots with large-scale robot skin is a challenging goal,especially when considering surfaces characterized by different shapes andcurvatures. The problem originates from technological advances in tactilesensing, and in particular from two requirements: (i) covering the largestpossible area of a robot's surface with tactile sensors, and (ii) doing itusing cheap, replicable hardware modules. Given modules of a specific shape,the problem of optimally placing them requires to maximize the number ofmodules that can be fixed on the selected robot body part. Differently fromprevious approaches, which are based on methods inspired by computationalgeometry (e.g., packing), we propose a novel layout design method inspired byphysical insights, referred to as Iterative Placement (ItPla), which arrangesmodules as if physical forces acted on them. A number of case studies from theliterature are considered to evaluate the algorithm.
展开▼
