TACTILE SENSING

Tactile sensing research has been frequently misinterpreted with sensor research. A variety of research efforts were directed to develop a sensor or combinations of sensors to function as human touch sense. The reason for the variety of interests in sensor research is embedded in the variety of questions tried to be answered. In order to find the right answer, the right question is required. The first question is "why do we need an artificial tactile sensing system?"... Let's consider a few eligible answers. First of all, we require robots to interact with human being considering the softness of body tissue. Therefore, the robots have to be able to detect soft tissue from bones. Secondly, we require minimally invasive surgery tools to provide information about the soft tissues of organs during surgery. Third, we need artificial tactile sensing to compensate for the deficiency of human tactile sensing in order to provide precisely quantified properties of soft tissues/materials. For..